Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown) checks out special fabric saved for her by Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) in Intimate Apparel (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
INTIMATE APPAREL
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org/shows
It takes a special kind of play to become a special kind of opera, but that is just what has happened with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, continuing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse through March 6. The original play debuted at Baltimore’s Center Stage in 2003 and moved the next year to the Roundabout, winning numerous Drama Desk, Obie, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel awards.
The new show is a profound transformation, part of the Met/LCT Opera/Musical Theater Commissioning project, the first-ever collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater. It began at the Met in 2014 with Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas’s Two Boys and was followed last year by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Intimate Apparel features a lovely score by Ricky Ian Gordon and a superb libretto by Nottage that deals with race, class, misogyny, and poverty.
The poignant drama takes place in Lower Manhattan in 1905, where Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown), the daughter of slaves, toils as a seamstress, saving up to someday open her own salon; she has amassed a small fortune, $1700, over seventeen years. At thirty-five, she worries that she is a spinster who will never find true love. She makes clothes for a wealthy white woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell), and lives in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich), an older Black widow who feels successful whenever one of her residents leaves to get married.
She asks, “How many girls have left here? / I can’t count them anymore. / They come as mere babies, / And I teach ’em all I know, / So when they leave, / And leave they must, / They leave here as refined ladies.” At the wedding of one of her residents, Corinna Mae (Jasmine Muhammad), Mrs. Dickson encourages Esther to consider Mr. Charles (Errin Duane Brooks) as a potential match, but she’s having none of it. “He been comin’ to these parties for two years, / And if he ain’t met a woman, / It ain’t a woman he after, I fears,” Esther answers. “Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson reasons. But Esther doesn’t believe in romance. “Love!? / I hate that word! / Love doesn’t come to no featherless bird. / Love is a music that I never heard,” she opines.
Esther is shocked to learn that George Armstrong (Justin Austin), a Barbadian working on the Panama Canal, has heard about her from the deacon’s son at her church and wants to correspond with her. Esther can’t read or write, but she begins an epistolary relationship with George with the help of Mrs. Van Buren.
Esther occasionally goes to the fabric seller, Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis), an Orthodox Jew who saves special bolts of cloth for her. There is obvious electricity between them, but when Esther puts her hand on him affectionately, he pulls away. “The color won’t rub off on you!” she declares angrily. Mr. Marks explains that his religion forbids him from touching any woman who isn’t his wife.
When George finally arrives in New York, he and Esther wed, but married life is not a bed of roses for her, as George seems to prefer hanging out with Mayme (Krysty Swann) in a saloon and not working. He wants to buy a dozen draft horses from a guy in the bar, but he needs Esther’s cash to make the purchase. Mayme, who gets her sexy outfits from Esther, dreams of being a pianist performing at Carnegie Hall. “We all wishing on something,” she says. “I smash all social rules. / ’Cause no one does it for us.” It’s not long before Esther, who has never been one to smash social rules, finds herself reevaluating what, and who, she wants in life.
Beautifully directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher (My Fair Lady, South Pacific), Intimate Apparel is an intimate sung-through chamber opera that feels right at home at the Newhouse. The music is performed by two pianists, associate conductor Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, facing each other on high platforms, with the words projected onto the walls (along with archival footage and photographs from the early 1900s). Gordon, whose previous opera adaptations include The Grapes of Wrath, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the just-concluded Yiddish version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, has created a moving score that floats through the theater.
Things get intimate at opera adaptation of Lynn Nottage play (photo by T. Charles Erickson)
Michael Yeargan’s spare set is centered by a circular wooden floor that rotates, with standing doors, a sewing machine, beds, and other pieces of furniture whisked on and off between scenes, blending in with Dianne McIntyre’s choreography. Catherine Zuber’s period costumes range from ravishing to appropriately dour; Esther sews daring outfits for others but allows herself only boring frocks.
The narrative was inspired by Nottage’s great-grandmother, who was a seamstress, and was written shortly after the death of Nottage’s mother; several characters feel imbued with a haunting loneliness. It also is a sharp representation of the immigrant experience, as men and women with roots from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa try to make lives of their own in difficult times, lacking the opportunities available to wealthier white families.
Piper Brown, who has appeared is such operas as Aida, La Traviata, and Carmen and such musicals as Ragtime and Caroline, or Change, has the acting chops to match her wonderful voice. Her expressive eyes and movement display how tired and beat down Esther is, wanting desperately to believe in herself without having to rely on anyone else, especially a man. (Chabrelle Williams performs the role at Wednesday and Saturday matinees.) The rest of the cast, which also includes Tesia Kwarteng, Anna Laurenzo, Barrington Lee, Indra Thomas, and Jorell Williams, is exemplary.
With this new version of Intimate Apparel, Nottage again proves that she is one of America’s most talented and important writers. She has explored the human condition, often through the lens of race, class, and socioeconomic injustice, in such stalwart works as Sweat, Ruined, Mlima’s Tale, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, compiling a kind of American quilt of powerful stories that has reached yet another level.