# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lynn Nottage's play "Sweat" is a tough yet empathetic portrait of the America that came undone.

# data[].attributes.headline
14. As the World Turned for Women in 1905 (The New York Times)

# data[].attributes.subject
14. As the World Turned for Women in 1905 (The New York Times)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Esther, played by Viola Davis in New York and by Stacey Sargeant here, is a talented seamstress, specializing in beautiful corsets, whose clients range from the pampered Fifth Avenue society wife Mrs. Van Buren (Amy Lynn Stewart), who hates her life, to a prostitute, Mayme (Nikiya Mathis), who could have been a successful pianist but instead sells herself for a dollar at a time.

Esther does well and has saved a good bit of money, put aside toward her dream of opening a beauty salon for black women. But she's lonely. Her landlady, Mrs. Dickson (Elain Graham), does not approve when Esther begins receiving letters from a certain George Armstrong (Curtis McClarin), a laborer on the Panama Canal, who has heard about her from a fellow worker there, a man who goes to Esther's church.

Their epistolary friendship, the equivalent of meeting online today, becomes a romance. A surprise awaits Esther, however, and Mr. McClarin deserves particular praise for making that surprise so convincing, playing two seemingly antithetical sides of the same character with equal conviction.

The other man in Esther's world is the gentle, charming Mr. Marks (Matthew Boston), who owns the store where she buys fabrics. He is an observant Jew who respects Old World traditions, but his affection for his favorite customer is obvious. "It isn't often that something so fine and delicate enters the store," he says, referring to a particular fabric but perhaps meaning Esther herself. Their love, obviously, can never be.

The playwright speaks through her creations with practical wisdom. Mrs. Dickson's romantic advice to Esther is "Don't let no man have a part of your heart without getting a piece of his." Mayme, asked to be part of a wedding, refuses to set foot inside a church. "I ain't got nothing to say to God," she explains. "And it don't seem right to go up into somebody's home and you ain't on speaking terms."

Tony Cisek's lovely scenic design is dominated by giant panels of hanging fabric. It beautifully evokes the tapestrylike nature of Ms. Nottage's powerful work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Intimate Apparel,' Unveiling Women's Lives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Esther, played by Viola Davis in New York and by Stacey Sargeant here, is a talented seamstress, specializing in beautiful corsets, whose clients range from the pampered Fifth Avenue society wife Mrs. Van Buren (Amy Lynn Stewart), who hates her life, to a prostitute, Mayme (Nikiya Mathis), who could have been a successful pianist but instead sells herself for a dollar at a time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage Video Response

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play RUINED has also received an OBIE, the Lucille Lortel Award, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play (Manhattan Theatre Club, Goodman Theatre). It premiered in London at the Almeida Theatre in April 2010, and will tour several US regional theatres in 2010-2011.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the author of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Intimate Apparel is a loving and evocative portrait of Esther, an independent but lonely African American seamstress in early 20th-century Manhattan who earns a living sewing exquisite lingerie for wealthy socialites uptown, and women of ill repute downtown.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage at The Grand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catch a sneak peek of The Grand Theatre production of this award winning play. On the MainStage now until March 7, 2015. Tickets available by calling 519 672 8800 or clicking www.grandtheatre.com

# data[].attributes.headline
8. Feature Address by Lynn Nottage, Playwright

# data[].attributes.subject
8. Feature Address by Lynn Nottage, Playwright

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Feature Address by Lynn Nottage, Playwright

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feature Address by Lynn Nottage, Playwright, at the 14th Annual Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards Ceremony.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Taped: 12/17/2004. Lynn Nottage describes her plays Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, and Poof, among others, as well as being an African American woman playwright. The acclaimed television series 'Women in Theatre' provides a unique look into the lives of some of the gifted women who create and sustain theatre in the United States -- with major directors, designers, actors, lyricists, composers and producers -- conducted by Linda Winer, theatre critic for Newsday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Intimate Apparel" by Lynn Nottage January 11 - 27, 2013 This prize-winning play was inspired by Nottage's grandmother, an African-American seamstress who, stitch by stitch, silk by lace, patiently sewed her way out of grinding poverty. A haunting portrayal of American urban life set at the same time as Chekhov's masterpiece, but at the other end of the social scale.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discussion of themes and motifs in Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of Intimate Apparel so you can excel on your essay or test.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel and what lies beneath my plays -- The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel and what lies beneath my plays -- The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A few years ago, the playwright Lynn Nottage went to clean out her grandmother's brownstone. While sorting through shabby clothing and yellowed magazines, she chanced upon a passport photograph of her great grandmother holding her two young daughters. The image, says Nottage over breakfast at a café near her Brooklyn home, reveals little. "It was very austere. Their faces were stripped of all emotion."

Nottage knew her great grandmother had worked as a seamstress and that she had married a Barbadian immigrant. She longed to discover more, but as "my mother was no longer alive and neither was my grandmother conscious enough," that stern face seemed destined to remain a cipher.

Nottage isn't the sort to leave a riddle unsolved. Ensconcing herself at the New York Public Library, she researched the city at the turn of the 20th century - the music, the streets, the people - searching for "this woman who was part of the fabric of my life, but who was very much a mystery to me." A year later, she emerged with a play, Intimate Apparel, which augments those few bare facts with a lush imagined history.

Intimate Apparel, which debuted in 2003, will have its UK premiere at the Theatre Royal Bath. Set in 1905, the play centres on Esther, a lonely black seamstress who stitches sumptuous corsets and negligees alone in her boarding house bedroom. But when she receives a letter from a workman digging the Panama canal, she begins to dream of sewing her own trousseau. As the Village Voice's Michael Feingold wrote of the Off-Broadway premiere, Nottage " harmonizes her age-old tale with a richness of detail and a nuanced complexity of thought."

Those who know Nottage only from her searing political drama Ruined, which played at the Almeida, or the stinging farce of Fabulation at the Tricycle, may not recognise her voice in the sweet, sad scenes of Intimate Apparel. Nottage, who has won practically ever accolade available, is chameleon-like. She can bounce effortlessly from elegiac memory play to backstage comedy, from naughty satire to earnest polemic. She has described herself as a "schizophrenic writer".

Well, you wouldn't know it to look at her. Dressed in a soft grey tunic and gold earrings, her hair a sleek torrent of braids, Nottage seems wholly poised - even while tucking into an omelette. Her speech is elegant and assured, though she isn't above the occasional caustic aside when discussing an unadventurous theatre or a lacklustre writer. And when she's deliberately impudent (as when she describes the red leather corset her husband commissioned to celebrate the opening night of Intimate Apparel) she gets a pleasingly wicked gleam in her eye.

It is diversity of subject, tone and structure that distinguishes her as a playwright, though as the Tricycle's artistic director Indhu Rubasingham notes, this variety stems from more than mere artistic restlessness or a desire for novelty. "I find her a modern day Shaman," says Rubasingham. "Her interest is not just about writing the next play but about the transformative power of theatre and art." Rubasingham believes that for each new play, Nottage struggles to find a form that can "change people's hearts".

Kate Whoriskey, who has directed several of Nottage's premieres, including Intimate Apparel, sees a commonality throughout, chiefly "articulating the stories of those without a voice." Her plays often centre on unlikely protagonists: shy schoolgirls, Congolese rape victims, bit-part Hollywood players. "All my plays are about people who have been marginalised," Nottage explains, people "who have been erased from the public record." Her dramas write these lost voices back into history.

In writing Intimate Apparel, Nottage set herself a formal challenge and also a tonal one. Every scene takes place in some sort of boudoir and Nottage says that she placed a bed in the middle of every scene, "because I wanted to see the way in which it impacts interactions. Even if the bed isn't used, even if no one sits on it, how does that change the sexual dynamic, the social intercourse?"

The central bed keeps the play focused on questions of intimacy. Relationships range from those which are physically passionate but devoid of emotional affection to those, like the bond between Esther and the Jewish fabric merchant Mr Marks, which are rich in love, but entirely chaste. To see Esther and Mr Marks together is to feel the almost unbearable poignancy of love denied.

The melancholic tenderness of this impossible romance results from a deliberate choice on Nottage's part. She'd seen a lot of what she calls "really macho theatre," so she set out to write "something simple and gentle". Scripting the play just after her mother's death, she suffused it with everything she felt at that time - love, loneliness, sadness, her loss of self.

Laurence Boswell, who will direct the play at Bath, recognizes both its sweetness and its sharpness, saying that the play explores not only "the harshness of this reality and the depth of the wounds" but also "the gentle lyricism" of the characters' dreams "and the passionate intensity of their hopes and aspirations".

Though Nottage has hardly been idle since scripting Intimate Apparel - writing Fabulation, Ruined, By the Way, and Meet Vera Stark, a new play exploring America's "deindustrial revolution" - she has never left it. Recently, the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center commissioned her to create a sung-through version. With composer Ricky Ian Gordon, she is working to "strip away a lot of the language and allow the essence of the play to live and breathe and find the poetry of it."

And Intimate Apparel remains with Nottage in at least one other way. It has gifted her with a profound appreciation for lingerie and its powers. Though she won't reveal just what she has on beneath that grey tunic, she extols the benefits of beautiful underclothing: "You can slip it on and no one needs to know. You're walking around New York and thinking, I feel really sexy because I'm wearing lingerie."

* Intimate Apparel is at the Ustinov Studio, Bath from 29 May to 28 June. Details: www.theatreroyal.org.uk

From the archive
* Lynn Nottage on watching Judi Dench in Mother Courage* A bar, a brothel and Brecht: Lynn Nottage on Ruined in 2010* Lynn Nottage's Ruined: a worthy Pulitzer prizewinner?
* This article was amended on 28 April 2014 to credit the main picture correctly to photographer Eugène Atget, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel and what lies beneath my plays

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A few years ago, the playwright Lynn Nottage went to clean out her grandmother's brownstone. While sorting through shabby clothing and yellowed magazines, she chanced upon a passport photograph of her great grandmother holding her two young daughters. The image, says Nottage over breakfast at a café near her Brooklyn home, reveals little.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Intimate Apparel is a play written by Lynn Nottage. The play is a co-production and co-commission between Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland, and South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California. The play is set in New York City in 1905 and concerns a young African-American woman who travels to New York to pursue her dreams, becoming an independent woman as a seamstress.