We’ll start with upbeat ragtime, that reversion to early 20th-century music theater for black storytelling.
But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the guest house where our heroine, Esther, a shy, simple woman of 35, sews corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers in her room. She’s too serious and ambitious to descend into the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.
That also applies to ‘Intimate clothing’. In the musical making of Lynn Nottage’s play of the same name, Ricky Ian Gordon, working on a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so striving for improvement in a time that makes it nearly impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment there is—and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, which opened in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.
The fact that the piece was excellent in the beginning was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that ‘Intimate Apparel’ had all the ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.
The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to turn her craft into a career; With the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt, she plans to open a beauty salon someday. The scene also confirms her pride, as she turns down the last chance men who come to the parties hosted by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.
“Pride will leave you lonely,” warns Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich).
Next, we meet two of her clients, whose lives express in different ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has all the luxuries a white woman of privilege could wish for, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a rich man’s wife, has no choice when her husband loses his interest.
Though poor and black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at the mercy of men for her few luxuries—which, amusingly, includes the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she’s got, you want,/what you’ve got, she wants,” Esther notes.) Instead of an absent husband, Mayme has underpants that are often mean or violent, yet she’s closer to Mrs. Van Buren than she is. might want to think.
Esther’s friendship with the women is more than professional, yet bounded by class and race. (She never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and probably never entered a brothel.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells cloth on Orchard Street and saves the finest bolts for her. Though he is the only man to ever acknowledge and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.
But he’s not the only man who flirts with her. Esther is surprised – and then, almost against her will, also pleased – to receive a letter from a Barbadian worker working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter the filth and harshness of his work with nice words. Because Esther cannot read or write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then to Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to come up with appropriate Cyrano-esque answers.
I won’t say anything more about the plot, except that at the end of the first act, Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who is wearing a beautiful dress made of fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what one might have expected from their correspondence, then he is not, she gradually realizes. In the second act we learn why.
Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch into their crisis. No “intimate clothing”; in view of the big picture, it retains both its integrity and its suspense until the very end. Without limiting itself to details – or, apparently, period research – Nottage forces audiences to keep an eye on the greater pressures that push all of her characters into situations that they eventually must escape from in a more explosive way.
I focus on the story, because that’s usually the problem with opera, the way books are with musicals. Nottage may have cut half of her playing to make room for Gordon’s music, making the smart, if painful, choice to keep only what is most closely aligned with the plot yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera isn’t really the verse (although Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary), but the rich texture of anything that does double duty.
So is Gordon’s lavish yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless sphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works ‘operacals’), always re-anchoring us to the specifics of period and character. In songs like “Nobody’s Doing It For Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram into beautiful melodies; they underscore the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it’s not for nothing that George’s brief arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if questioning their strange intimacy.
None of these smart choices would matter if the performers couldn’t make it up, but Sher has assembled and tuned in an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther – and amazingly tireless in a major role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to hold up. But all six leads are great, and the ensemble of eight other singers perform dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.
Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels crowded, and Catherine Zuber’s costumes are exquisite, even if they are simple. As always it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural – the sound is by Marc Salzberg – that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed . And while the voices are given priority in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played Friday night by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to be playing their own dramatic roles, representing not only the need of women, especially black women, for emotional independence, but the 1905 world that forbids it.
In that sense, ‘Intimate Apparel’ – more like an opera than a play – is an act of salvation. When Esther says to Ms. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life isn’t worth words, really,” she means she’s not special enough to be made permanent on paper. That is not true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worth even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.
Intimate clothing
Through March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.