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Theater Review - "Intimate Apparel" Looks at Life and its Constraints
June 30, 2007
by Paul Donovan
If there's a job that I almost never think about, it's lingerie maker. I don't know why - I love seeing people in sexy underwear. It just never crossed my mind. And I certainly wouldn't have thought about using underwear for an extended metaphor for a woman's life. However, the show playing at the Unicorn Theatre until July 15, Intimate Apparel, made me realize that there is more to "unmentionables"? than deciding whether to wear boxers or briefs.
Intimate Apparel, trumpeted by the Unicorn as the "most produced play in American Regional Theatre in the last two years," takes place in New York about 100 years ago. Esther is a naive African American corset maker who is beginning to see middle age approaching. She spends her days making dresses and various forms of undergarments for everyone from unattached women in her boarding house, to stripper/prostitutes wanting to look and feel rich, to lonely Fifth Avenue housewives who want to look and feel like the easy women in the strip clubs. Esther just kind of floats from one level of society to another, watching everyone try to feel like someone else in their quest for personal relationships and love.
One of Esther's great joys is going to a local Jewish merchant to peruse and buy his fine fabrics. The merchant, Mr. Marks, is constrained by his conservative beliefs but nonetheless manages to create a special friendship with Esther. At the same time, Esther also begins a long-distance correspondence with George, a worker on the Panama Canal.
As Esther's relationship with Mr. Marks slowly blossoms, she moves much more quickly with George, their angst-filled romantic letters growing in familiarity and intensity. Desperate to keep her illiteracy a secret from George, Esther enlists the help of several clients to fashion her letters back to him, until one day George decides to come to New York to marry Esther.
Of course, it doesn't take long for Esther's carefully woven life to start fraying, as the different threads of her heart and mind start going in different directions. George is not exactly the same guy that she knew in her letters. Her rich client, Mrs. Van Buren, starts exhibiting a friendship that Esther is not prepared to handle. And Esther finds it hard to stop herself from pushing the strict boundaries of Mr. Marks.
Setting the study of Esther's life among fabric and undergarments makes for a fascinating metaphor. Each one of Esther's relationships illustrates a particular form of intimacy, and the audience begins to understand that not all forms of intimacy are really compatible with each other. You can almost see the fabric of Esther's life being woven and altered in front of your eyes, as she moves from one plot thread to another, each one wrapping around the other, until undeniable patterns emerge. While the ultimate point of the story is not the most original, it is presented in such a subtle and hypnotic way that it didn't bother me.
Lynn King plays Esther with a curious mixture of restraint and vigor. She has an extremely demanding role, as I don't think she leaves the stage one time in the whole production. Her character has remained in my mind longer than most characters do.
The rest of the cast, while existing as a support for King, do well in their own little pockets of Esther's life. Dean Vivian plays Mr. Marks with a nervous joviality. Jacqueline Gafford plays the landlady of Esther's boarding house, the mother hen who provides Esther with advice whether Esther wants it or not. Toccarra Cash is Mayme, Esther's stripper friend/client. Cash exudes that naughty-but-not-really-bad energy that turns her too-brief appearances on stage into great moments. Big, sexy Mykel Hill plays George, the big, sexy Panamanian worker in Esther's life. Hill does a great job of handling George as focused but rather naïve in his own way, so that you almost believe that what happens is not really his fault. And then there's Katie Gilchrist. I love Katie Gilchrist. Her character, Mrs. Van Buren, is a great mix of bravado and loneliness, and you just want to run up on stage and hug her.
Intimate Apparel is much better than you might think just looking at the advertisement. It's an interesting look at the human drama that may not tell us a whole lot new, but tells it in a compelling way in any case.
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