Lynn Nottage’s 2004 play Intimate Apparel has been reimagined as an opera, now playing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. My reaction to the two shows couldn’t be more different.
I loved the original, which starred Viola Davis as Esther, a 35-year-old Black spinster seamstress longing for love in 1905 New York City. It was a simple yet lovely story that made me fall in love with Esther and want her to be happy.
She was strong, but she felt left out of life. Over the years she attended nearly two dozen parties at her boardinghouse for the other women who were getting married, each time thinking “Why ain’t it me?”
The Esther in the new production, played by Kearstin Piper Brown, asks the same question, only in song, singing, “Love is a music I ain’t ‘ever heard.” The difference is that the tenderness of the original that made me care deeply about Esther is gone.
Intimate Apparel, A New Opera, for which Nottage wrote the libretto, has a cast of 16 crowding the small stage. It is busy almost to the point of frenetic. Under the direction of Bartlett Sher, with choreography by Dianne McIntyre, cast members go back and forth, back and forth, and in circles in scene after scene and when they’re not moving, Michael Yeargan’s set revolves.
The original was enchanting. I cheered for Esther with her no-nonsense attitude and her refusal to settle just for the sake of getting married, and I worried as I watched her fall under the spell of a mysterious stranger who courts her by letter from Panama where he is a laborer on the Canal, working beside the son of her church’s deacon. Esther had put away money year after year — $100 for every year she’d been at her sewing machine — to open a beauty parlor for colored ladies. I waited tensely to see how she would end up.
I was too distracted by the busyness of the opera and the constant need to look up at the subtitles and not the stage. These two things, plus having the entire story sung in a form I don’t enjoy distanced me from the character I had loved so much. I felt no involvement in her life, so when the mysterious stranger, George Armstrong (Justin Austin), showed up in New York, I didn’t care.
What I did like, besides Catherine Zuber’s rich period costumes, was Ricky Ian Gordon’s music, a blending of ragtime and other early 20th century American music. It is performed on two pianos, elevated on platforms on either side of the stage, under the direction of Steven Osgood.
When Intimate Apparel first played in New York, many in theatre circles thought it would win the Pulitzer, but that honor went to Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. Nottage went on to make history as the first woman to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017.
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