About the Play:

Intimate Apparel has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Female Scenes and Female/Male Scenes.

Intimate Apparel is a full-length drama by Lynn Nottage. A turn-of-the-century black seamstress uses her gifted hands to fashion her dreams in an era when the cut of one's dress and the colour of one's skin determined the course of one's life. Intimate Apparel chronicles the hopes and heartbreaks of ordinary people, touching on themes of race, class, gender, and religion, in a moving portrait of love, resilience, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Intimate Apparel is set in 1905 in New York City. Esther is an independent but lonely black seamstress who lives in a boarding house for women and sews intimate apparel. Her skills and discretion are much in demand from clients who range from wealthy white patrons to prostitutes, and she has managed to stuff a goodly sum of money into her quilt over the years – while earnestly daydreaming of new beginnings, romantic possibilities. One by one, the other denizens of the boarding house marry and move away, but Esther remains, lonely and longing for a husband and a future. Her plan is to find the right man and use the money she's saved to open a beauty parlour where black women will be treated as royally as the white women she sews for. By way of a mutual acquaintance, she begins to receive beautiful letters from a lonesome Caribbean man named George who is working on the Panama Canal. Being illiterate, Esther has one of her patrons respond to the letters, and over time the correspondence becomes increasingly intimate until George persuades her that they should marry, sight unseen. Meanwhile, Esther's heart seems to lie with the Orthodox Jewish fabric seller from whom she buys cloth, and his heart with her, but the impossibility of the match is obvious to them both, and Esther consents to marry George. When George arrives in New York, however, he turns out not to be the man his letters painted him to be, and he absconds with Esther's savings, frittering it away on whores and liquor. Deeply wounded by the betrayal, but somehow unbroken, Esther returns to the boarding house determined to use her gifted hands and her sewing machine to refashion her dreams and make them anew from the whole cloth of her life's experiences. Inspired by a true story, Intimate Apparel is a heart-rending contemporary work in the style of an enduring classic – from the first female playwright to win two Pulitzers.

Intimate Apparel premiered in 2003 at Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland. Since then the play opened Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre in 2004, winning the 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle and the Outer Critics Circle Awards. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…a deeply moving portrait of Esther, a middle-aged African-American woman… Nottage's play has a delicacy and eloquence that seem absolutely right for the time she is depicting…New York has no richer play…." — New York Daily News

"The language of Intimate Apparel is a thing of beauty, at times approaching poetry...The play is a story about citizens grabbing for the same crust of bread, occasionally pulling nourishment from one another's mouths. It is a parable about sweet dreams and honeyed words that, in an instant, can turn sour." — Los Angeles Times

"…thoughtful, affecting … The play offers poignant commentary on an era when the cut and color of one's dress — and of course, skin — determined whom one could and could not marry, sleep with, even talk to in public." — Variety

"Ms. Nottage has done so much good historical research…I want Ms. Nottage to keep working with this form; we see it so little, and we need it so much." — New York Times

"…a near-perfect balance between content and execution…." — Associated Press

About the Playwright:

Lynn Nottage is an African-American playwright and screenwriter whose work often deals with the lives of African Americans and women. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, and is also an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined and for Sweat, making her the first woman to win the prestigious award twice.