Fabric in “Intimate Apparel” is a proxy for love and lust — how silk, satin and wool feel against the back of the hand stands in for how a lover’s skin might feel when the person is far away, geographically or socially. Or how clothing smells, of spices or flowers, is how a lover might smell, so characters bury their faces in it. Fussing over a jacket; giving or making clothing; wearing a new outfit to impress; stitching a secret in a pocket; folding laundry; being silly in skivvies in a boudoir together — follow who does what for whom through clothing, and you trace how love tumbles forth and stops short in a small corner of Manhattan in 1905.
Unlike words, fabric never tells lies.
Such is the poetic vision of this 2003 play from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage, but one that’s now in an uneven Lorraine Hansberry Theatre production as the company’s first in-person show sinceMargo Halltook the helm as artistic director and since the pandemic upended the theater world.
The play, which opened Saturday, April 2, at the Magic Theatre (the Hansberry’s “new home for now,” as Hall put it), centers on seamstress Esther (Jeunée Simon), who seems to lead a lonely life in a rooming house. She’s a savvy businesswoman, though, making fancy undergarments for both white ladies on Fifth Avenue and Black sex workers. She also has a rich, imaginative inner life, despite not being able to read or write, dreaming of opening a beauty parlor for Black women and observing the world around her with the keen, compassionate eye of an artist.
Yet the show, directed by Jan Hunter, gets off to such a slow start that Nottage’s exquisitely envisioned world almost doesn’t come together. One actor is so unsteady with her lines and her reason for being onstage that it looks as if she’s drifting about the set in search of answers, reducing the play’s drama to whether she’ll make it to the end of the scene. Another overdoes a Southern accent to the point that nothing else can fit on stage, including situation and character.
Eventually, Nottage’s fine craftsmanship starts to shine through, as Esther starts writing letters to George (Khary Moye), who’s working on the Panama Canal and wants only a lady pen pal to think about at night and maybe meet and marry one day. His gentle words compete with those of Mr. Marks (Samuel Vegas), a fabric salesman who notices Esther’s every flutter and smile, who shares her appreciation for the finest textiles, but who, as an Orthodox Jewish immigrant, cannot wear any of the colors he admires so profoundly or touch a woman to whom he’s not related.
西蒙和拉斯维加斯excel在他们的场景,showing how a pause can be filled to bursting, how longing can brim with hope and devastation at the same time, each feeling egging on the other. And as the sex worker Mayme, Jasmine Milan Williams lights up the stage each time she appears, painting a portrait of fun and play as a survival mechanism.
When Williams’ Mayme and Simon’s Esther embark on flights of fancy together, bounding for a heartbreakingly brief instant about the stage as if they were little girls, Williams multiplies the scene’s pathos in the way she has to shut it down and then brush off the shutdown as if it’s no big deal, even though it is. Being playful is coping, but her Mayme can’t go too far. Then she might really start to hope for a different life.
Through halting dialogue and excruciatingly slow transitions that stretch the show’s run time toward three hours, Simon keeps righting the ship each time it veers off course. She packs a lifetime of stifled yearnings and painfully swallowed slights into each hesitation, each line. As the play ratchets toward its devastating conclusion, each bit of fullness Simon ekes out becomes all the more important, as Esther must learn to find joy and fulfillment in herself alone.
L“Intimate Apparel”:Written by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Jan Hunter. Through April 16. Two hours, 50 minutes. $30-$40. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, Third Floor, S.F. 415-474-8800.www.lhtsf.org