“Don’t you let no man have no part of your heart without getting a piece of his.” Profound words and life lessons to live by from Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, which is now appearing on stage at Compass Rose Theater at the top of the 2024/2025 season. Directed by Lottie E. Porch, this vibrant period drama, set in Lower Manhattan in 1905, is a heartfelt tale of Esther, a colored woman who stitches intimate apparel to make her living and all of the subsequent trials and tribulations that accompany that lifestyle at that time.
As a small, non-for-profit professional theatre company, the production quality standards and overall caliber of the show are expected to be at a certain level and unfortunately for Intimate Apparel some of those components in the production fell short of their benchmark. With the beautifully intimate space upstairs on the third floor of Maryland Hall, the devil is in the details. (There’s no credited dramaturg so the design team and director/producer will shoulder the burden of responsibility equally here.) When your nearest audience member is less than a foot away from the performers and the action on the stage, things like cardboard-squares for fabric bolts in the tailor shop feel horribly modern, especially when the barcode shopping labels still affixed to a few of them. The ‘handmade jacket’ that Esther stitched for her husband for their wedding night (which gets passed from George to Mayme to Mr. Marks throughout the progression of the play) should not have a visible designer label stitched into it. The antique sewing machine in Mrs. Dickson’s boarding house room should have a functioning foot pedal. It’s the little things that detract from wholly immersing the audience in 1905.
Set Builders Omar Said and Brodie James Osbourne, under the vision of Director Lottie E. Porch, fabricate a simple yet elegant set— complete with pattern-stamped wall printing, even going so far as to have the implication of a rusty-pipe leak staining the far corner of the wall— which is well utilized from a spatial arrangement standpoint. Director Lottie E. Porch manages to create a sense of multiple unique locations on the one, intimate stage simply shifting the furnishings slightly within each one. The period-vintage furnishings for each setting— particularly Mrs. Van Buren’s boudoir— are really lovely, which makes the little things that scream modernity extra frustrating. There’s also some costume-related continuity issues happening in Costume Designer Katelyn Marie’s department. When Mr. Taylor hands her the dark cobalt blue ‘Japanese silk’ which she’s supposed to be using for Mrs. Van Buren’s corset and then the scraps for the fancy jacket for her husband…only one of those two fabricated garments ends up matching the bolt on display from the shop (and the other is a bright-popping sky blue by comparison.) A similar issue goes for the glorious, embroidered and detailed white fabric that Mr. Marks gifts to Esther to make her own wedding dress…which ends up looking very different once it’s in ‘dress form’ on the actress. Again these seem like minute details but they detract from the action when the audience is so intimately close to the performance space.
There were also some Sound Design inconsistencies, though this is a matter of personal debate. The second act had period-adjacent music piped between each scene, whereas in the first act (though I was reassured by the producer that such sound effects/music were present between scenes) they were less noticeable or perhaps less memorable. It’s unclear if this is because the scenic transitions in the first act happened more quickly, giving the sound effects less time to land on the audiences’ ear or if there was so much heightened action in the scenes of the second act there was more to notice overall from a ‘bigger picture’ standpoint. To the design team’s credit, Marianne Meadows’ lighting was effective and subtle, particularly when it come to the trajectory used to light ‘George’s Journey’ from the back of the house to the stage. Props & Costumes master Debra Fortier and Susan Flynn, working with Katelynn Marie, did do a wonderful job of gussying up the snap-front closure corsets with lots of flowers, ribbons, and other embellishments. And the majority of the props, particularly the hand-held ones, were mostly passible for their time frame.
The pacing of the show, overall, was uneven. There were moments where dialogue exchanges were delivered swiftly and with clear emotional intent, particularly late in the second act once the Esther character had finally come to terms with her situation and decided to be active with her choices, but then there were other times when the dialogue felts stifled, a little coldly delivered, and almost as if it were being read. Despite this imbalanced sense of delivery and pacing, the show moved relatively fluidly and didn’t feel overly lengthy in its duration. One of the most impressive things that Director Lottie E. Porch achieved was in her trajectory path of George. When the audience is first introduced to the character, he is but a disembodied letter-reading voice (who if you spin 180 around and face the back of the house, you’ll see the actor in a warm glowing light, almost insinuating that he’s in the heated sunlight of Panama.) With every subsequent encounter, George moves through the house, a little closer to the stage, narrating his letters to Esther, mirroring a metaphor of the journey he’s making to physically get to her in Manhattan. This is a clever and symbolic use of the play space and works to Porch’s advantage. There’s also a divinely striking moment at the very end of the production where Esther is standing alone on the stage, clutching herself in a particular way, which leads to strong implications of exactly how her situation has changed from the story’s beginning to its conclusion.
Mr. Marks (Conor Scanlan) as well as the Mrs. Van Buren (Jessica Cooperstock) characters have superb handles on their dialect and vernacular, as does George (Evan Carrington.) Scanlan’s Mr. Marks is meant to be a Jewish tailor from Ukraine, who runs a shop in lower Manhattan and the way he presents his vocal affectation is consistent and familiar, without playing into a caricature or stereotype, and it’s his interactions, however subtle and almost non-existent with Esther that truly make for the most touching and endearing moments of the performance. Cooperstock’s Mrs. Van Buren is equally well-versed in her vocal southern-styled airs and graces, particularly when it comes to speaking with that sophisticated sound. She’s mindfully present on stage, though the blocking and ultimate execution of the ‘surprise scene’ between she and Esther feels a little clunky. Both Scanlan and Cooperstock do a fine job of making their tertiary characters exist with a dynamic feel, rather than just as static background informants to the story.
Carrington’s George is almost a duality of portrayal, where ‘George’ from the letters is perceived in one light (both physically and metaphorically speaking) and ‘George On Arrival’ is quite a different persona. Carrington handles the subtle shifts beautifully, all the while maintaining his Barbados-heavy accent to a degree that is both consistent but still audibly intelligible. His temperament, particularly once things go south with Esther is impressive and you get this disorienting sensation as to whether or not he’s trustworthy, or at times, even real.
Mayme (Lezlie Hatcher) is quite the pip in the production, though at times gestures and speaks with just a flare of modernity beyond the character’s time. Hatcher has a series of progressively emotionally twisting scenes shared with Esther that make Lynn Nottage’s story really spring from the pages of the play. When Hatcher and Danielle J. Curry’s Esther have libations of a celebratory nature together, while they get a little too slurred-of-speech and clumsy-of-foot a little too quickly, it’s rather entertaining. And when they have their come to blows moment over kernels of truth and actualization, it’s quite palpable and viscerally impressive.
Tackling the role of the bubbly busybody, Mrs. Dickson, Kecia Campbell has an overly joyous nature about her character portrayal but also grounds the character firmly in reality when she gets her lengthy soliloquy/monologue talking about her mother the wash woman and how and why she married. Campbell plays well off of Esther, particularly in those cheekier moments— like delivering a letter from George, which as the landlady she has conveniently already opened.
Danielle J. Curry, as the principal character of Esther, is a fortified storyteller and often finds ways to occupy her physicality on the stage, particularly when seated at the sewing machine (which has neither a functioning foot pedal or a way to push fabric effectively/realistically through its top-surface.) Curry feels a little flat in the beginning of the story as Esther, but this is deliberate and makes for a dynamic and stark juxtaposition to the fury that she unearths late in the second act. When tearing through her heart in those latter scenes opposite of Mayme, you get a glorious sense of catharsis and your soul weeps for her experience. Curry manages a perfectly miserable face every time she’s meant to be looking a bit dour or put out and her interactions with each of the other five characters on stage is as fine as thread, weaving delicately in and out of each scenario. This is particularly true of the surreally subtle flirtations with Mr. Marks.
Ultimately a mixed bag, the script is strong, most of the performances are solid but the production quality on the whole could use a bit of a polish. Intimate Apparel plays through the first weekend in October and is the first of four shows being offered this season at Compass Rose Theater.
Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes with one intermission
Intimate Apparel plays through October 6th 2024 with Compass Rose Theater live at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts— 801 Chase Street (third floor) in Annapolis, MD. Tickets are available for purchase by calling the box office at 410-980-6662 or in advance online.
