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Review: ‘Intimate Apparel’ engaging, smooth, satisfying By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune If 1905 New York City is a melting pot, the melting is the kind that leaves a lump here, a lump there and another over there. Each has its place, from socialites on Fifth Avenue to Jewish refugees in the Lower East Side to “colored” inhabitants of the teeming Tenderloin with its saloons and brothels. To be a black woman in this world is to occupy the lowest of places. To be all that and an illiterate spinster too is, well, fraught. It is to playwright Lynn Nottage’s credit that such a character engages us. It is to the credit of the director Timothy Bond and a fine cast that the production of “Intimate Apparel” that opened Saturday night may be the high point of a still-young season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play won the 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and productions of it have multiplied, and now we know why. Esther Mills (Gwendolyn Mulamba) is a 35-year-old virgin who lives in a rooming house and makes a living sewing beautiful undergarments for women with money to spend. She worked her way north as a field hand and in 17 years has seen 22 boarders leave to get married. Esther wants a man. “Do you think there is something wrong with a woman alone?” she asks. But you’d better be careful what you wish for. Esther begins getting letters from George Armstrong (Erik LaRay Harvey), a native of Barbados laboring on the construction of the Panama Canal who heard of her from a fellow worker from Esther’s church. His name suggests hubris. Esther makes sexy underwear for Mrs. Van Buren (Terri McMahon), a lonely socialite, and Mayme (Tiffany Adams), a ragtime piano player and prostitute. She talks of loneliness with Mrs. Dickson (Perri Gaffney), the boarding house owner, who admits marrying an older man and living with his opium habit in return for security. She buys wonderful fabrics from Mr. Marks (Gregory Linington), an orthodox Jewish merchant who sells out of his cramped tenement and who has a fiancee he’s never met living in Romania. A few years ago it was rumored that mythologist Joseph Campbell was required reading at certain Hollywood studios. Consciously or not, Nottage gives Esther a hero’s journey of an arc. She is summoned by a herald (a Cyrano-like letter from George) to a Great Adventure. She refuses at first, then crosses a threshold (answering the letter) into a special world (the leap of faith that is her marriage), has a mentor (Mrs. Dickson), has trials with allies and enemies, undergoes a supreme ordeal and ultimately returns with a Priceless Jewel of transformative knowledge. In true mythic fashion, the characters keep shifting shapes. George is a homme fatale who woos Esther with honeyed words but becomes something different, and sad. Mrs. Van Buren is an ally who ultimately implodes into her own emptiness. Mayme is both ally and adversary. Mr. Marks is an ally who could almost be Esther’s beloved — there’s a sharp frisson of possibility in one scene — but he is stuck in yet another place. With fancy underthings as a metaphor for different kinds of intimacy, each of these shapeshifters illuminates a different facet of the deceptively complex Esther. Each sharply drawn character is further defined by the poetry of Nottage’s prose. Harvey delivers chiseled lines in a lilting Caribbean patois. Mrs. Dickson tells Esther to let a man have “... no part of your heart without getting a piece of his.” “That my life,” Esther says, “thousands of tiny stitches.” Surely the depths of this production — and the whole is even greater than the sum of its intricacies — spring in part from the fact that this is Bond’s fourth go at it (and he turned down two more!). He directed versions in Minneapolis last fall and Louisville and Cleveland this winter and says this one is completely different. It is Mulamba’s third Esther. The result of all this is that “Intimate Apparel” is consummately smooth (other than a couple of mechanical stage snafus on opening night), yet it has an energy about it that suggests the company is still finding new wonders. The play brims with textures and color and touching and appeals to the senses, particularly Deborah M. Dryden’s women’s costumes and fabrics, and Michael Keck’s original ragtime and klezmer music. Nottage writes terrific scenes. Like one in which Esther discovers George’s betrayal, and one in which George reveals his values. By the time Esther rips open a quilt (her heart) to offer up the contents, we suspect she knows, with us, the truth, but she feels she has no choice but to play out her hand and shoot the moon. There are few surprises in the play; Nottage breaks no new dramatic ground. But she does give us that rarity in the contemporary theater, a wholly satisfying ending. Mulamba’s performance is a wonder, and it ends in a freeze-frame moment designed to feel like a faded photo from the past. We know the photos’s subject. We have journeyed with her, and we are the richer for it. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected].