Intimate Apparel Weaves Painful Truths at Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

This is a multilayered play by one of our foremost playwrights, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Lynn Nottage.  She juggles so many themes in Intimate Apparel, it dazzles.  In the hands of Palm Beach Dramaworks, this achingly lyrical play, set in lower Manhattan in 1905, is an abundance of disquieting truths, and underlying hopes.  The language of the play is ineffably beautiful.  

The playwright has created memorable and tragically flawed characters, falling victim to societal norms and personal adversity.  Intimate Apparel’s themes of isolation and yearning to be loved are universal. Although set in the early 20^th century, the play’s underlying racism, sexism, and division by religion or culture resonate today.  No wonder it was recently adapted as an opera, the playwright becoming the librettist; all sold out performances at Lincoln Center and soon to be shown on PBS’ Great Performances.

“I wrote Intimate Apparel in part because of my desire to get closer to my ancestors,” Nottage told PBD Producing Artistic Director William Hayes in a 2020 interview (available on YouTube).  “I wanted to understand what it might have been like for a single, Black woman at the turn of the century to try and forge a life in New York City despite all the obstacles she probably had to face. I also wanted to write a play for my mother, something that she would have loved to have seen, something that was in her gentle, loving spirit.”

Rita Cole is a heartbreaking Esther, a 35-year-old African American seamstress whose imaginative creations are sought out by her friends and wealthy matrons from high society.  She lives in a boarding house and has watched twenty-two women come and go during her eighteen years there.  Esther has been left behind in the contests of love and marriage.  She longs for their experience.  Cole reveals her character’s sadness and seriousness of purpose, preserving her sense of rectitude while saving all the money she’s earned over the years inside a quilt she made. 

 

Rita Cole and Jordan Sobel

 

Stealthily central to the play is the ethereal but forbidden love of two artisans, Esther and Mr. Marks. Her appreciation of fine fabrics and artistic creations are much-admired by her Hasidic merchant Mr. Marks tenderly played by Jordan Sobel.  Together, they marvel at the fabrics, with a subliminal yearning for one another, but their ethnicity and societal norms prevent even a passing touch.  Sobel sustains a sense of awkwardness because of the ethnic divide when Esther is near.  He too is enveloped by loneliness and need for love but is soon to be part of an arranged marriage.

Esther’s landlady Mrs. Dickson, and Mrs. Van Buren, her society patron, urge her to settle as they have.  They have been in loveless marriages.  

 

Gabrielle Lee and Rita Cole

Gabrielle Lee, as the boardinghouse landlady, sashays across the stage capturing her character’s pragmatic and confident attitude as well as her love for Esther who she treats like a daughter.  Mrs. Dickson’s unfortunate marriage, however, allowed her to escape being a washwoman like her mother who would caution: “Marry up,” showing her bleeding scarred hands “Look what love done to me.”  In a moment of foreshadowing Mrs. Dickson movingly warns Esther, Don’t you let no man have no part of your heart without getting a piece of his.

Rita Cole and Krystal Mosley

 

Her friend, for whom she also sews, Mayme, is robustly performed by Krystal Mosley.  She is a prostitute, and a singer and piano player at one of the saloons in “The Tenderloin” section of Manhattan (a red light district of night clubs and brothels).   She has a jaundiced view of men and ultimately becomes pivotal to the plot.  Mosley projects her character’s easy going, breezy aplomb.  When Esther is fitting Mayme for a corset she perfectly captures the irrationality of class issues telling Mayme about Mrs. Van Buren and the expensive corsets she has made for her:  You know that white lady I talk about sometime…. She keep asking me what they be wearing up in the Tenderloin. All that money and high breeding and she wore what you wearing.…What she got, you want, what you got, she want.

In spite of Esther and Mayme being from opposite sides of a moral fence, they are the best of friends.  Esther heartachingly shares the dream for her lifelong savings with Mayme: I own a quaint beauty parlor for colored ladies…. The smart set. Someplace east of Amsterdam, fancy, where you get pampered and treated real nice. ‘Cause no one does it for us. We just as soon wash our heads in a bucket and be treated like mules. But I’m talking about is someplace elegant.

Enter the catalyst, George Armstrong played by Jovon Jacobs (the only PBD veteran in the play) who at first has an epistolary relationship with Esther as he is working on the Panama Canal.  In a series of letters back and forth of escalating intimacy, Esther sees a means of marrying a man she’s never met.  

 

Jovon Jacobs and Rita Cole

 

The role of George is a multifaceted one and Jacobs embraces it with seething sexuality and raw emotion, playing both the villain and the victim.  He also fills the stage with his physicality.  Jacobs’ passion as George dominates his many monologues such as when he says of the “Panama project,” that has killed thousands of black laborers like himself: But when the great oceans meet and the gentlemen celebrate, will we colored men be given glasses to raise?

The play gradually shifts to betrayal of dreams as George is not as he represented himself in “his” letters and Esther, who is illiterate, has had to have her letters ghost written for her, mostly by Mrs. Van Buren who vicariously plunges into love on her behalf, the kind of love she herself has been denied.  

 

Gracie Winchester and Rita Cole

Mrs. Van Buren, played by Gracie Winchester, whose station in life is ensured by her wealth and her white ethnicity, is ironically one of the loneliest characters in the play and she forms an attachment to Esther who is completely unaware of her feelings.  Gracie Winchester lustfully portrays her character’s true feelings saying to Esther while drunk:  It is so easy to be with you. Your visits are about the only thing I look forward to these days. You and our letters to George, of course.

Those letters are an integral part of the play’s climatic moment, Rita Cole and Jovon Jacobs ascending to an unforgettable dramatic peak.

Self-deception, betrayal, and the vulnerability of women, shatter Esther’s dream of opening a beauty parlor for “colored ladies.”  George’s dreams of becoming a builder die away as he is a Barbadian immigrant without connections; those dreams fading into get rich quick schemes.  Mayme’s dreams of being a concert pianist long ago yielded to prostitution.  Yet despite all these headwinds, Esther’s intrinsic steadfastness and skill ultimately serve as her Phoenix.  The American Dream is so often seen as the exclusive province of WASPs in literature and theater; Nottage movingly shows us another dimension.

There are multiple scenes and settings, a challenge for Michael Amico, the Scenic Designer.  As scenes flow right into one another, his utilitarian solution is elegant, capturing the Belle Époque look and feel of the era, in a proscenium framed like a photograph.  From stage right to left, there are Mayme’s boudoir and piano, Esther’s boarding house bed, above that a small platform in which we see George in Panama, then Esther’s circa 1900 sewing machine, operational and symbolic, further, Mrs. Van Buren’s dressing room and finally Mr. Marks’ treasure chest of fine fabrics.

 

The Director, Be Boyd (her PBD debut), uses the full breadth of the stage to create dramatic movement, irrespective of the scene pocket “owned” by the character, the audience having to use its imagination.  It works.  Boyd’s experience as a teacher shows (in addition to being a director, she’s an Associate Professor, School of Performing Arts, at The University of Central Florida), asking her actors to fully embrace the theme of dreams denied.  The pacing of the first act may be a little slow, but necessary for each word to clearly land.  Those who patiently allow the action to simply unfold are well rewarded.

Lighting design by Kirk Bookman works with these pockets of scenes, lighting each area and flowing into the next with the action. There are subtle changes in lighting color and watch the lighting behind the curtains.

Roger Arnold’s sound design focuses on some original ragtime pieces that Dramaworks commissioned Josh Lubin to compose for the production, ones joyfully played by Mayme on her piano.  Transitional moments feature other music of the period as well as the sounds George might have heard in Panama while working on the canal.

Resident Costume Designer, Brian O'Keefe, has more than met the challenge of designing multiple period pieces, for George and the women of different socio-economic classes, many of them specifically called for by the playwright.  The authenticity of his hand sewn costumes adds immeasurably to the production.  There are the exquisite silk corsets and undergarments, multiple dresses, a man’s suit, and the beautiful smoking jacket which had to be hand created twice because it was impossible to unnoticeably transport it between two critical scenes.

A special call goes out to the props staff of PBD, particularly for the vintage sewing machine which carries the play’s arc, to the wig designer, Anne Nesmith, and to the Stage Manager Suzanne Clement Jones who successfully navigates the Director’s staging of this intricate play.

Lynn Nottage and Palm Beach Dramaworks have given us a window into a world of the past, one of uncomfortable truths about class, gender and race.  It is a courageous production, both in content and performance.  The play, which Variety called “note-perfect,” runs through April 17.

 

All photographs of actors in the play are by Jason Nuttle

‘The Duration’ – A World Premiere of a Play with Enduring Relevancy

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks has staged a new highly charged family drama by Bruce Graham, The Duration.  It is the outcome of its successful Dramaworkshop.  The play was given a virtual reading by Drama (in the) Works last year and the process shows collaborative dramaturgy at its best.  Bruce Graham is not new to PBD, having had his play Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grille staged in the 2003 - 2004 season.  

Although “duration” refers to a time period, its etymology means “to harden.”  There is that and letting go in this affecting, but frequently unsettling drama of love and loss, the consequences of 9/11.  As serious as it is, the play is laced with humor, some dark and some laugh aloud a welcome balance, the way real people cope with heartache.   You also could call this a murder (of the spirit) mystery play and Graham keeps the audience in suspense as to where it might lead, to a startling climax, and a touching resolution.

Audrey Batten is a history professor at a catholic university, FDR’s administration being her forte.  She’s well-known, but a “low budget Doris Kearns Goodwin” as she self-deprecatingly acknowledges.  She is an advocate for sharp rational thinking and liberal values at least until 9/11, which resulted in the death of her son in the World Trade Center (her husband had been killed by a drunk driver only a year before).  Her former scientific reasoning is not helping her grieving heart. 

Seeing someone in a hijab at the university soon after 9/11 serves as a traumatic catalyst; suddenly Audrey leaves her academic surroundings, without notice, and rents an isolated cabin in the mountains of Pennsylvania.  Has she lost her mind in a crisis of anger and values?  In pursuit of an answer is her daughter Emma, suffering as well for the double loss of father as well as brother.

Caitlin Duffy and Elizabeth Dimon Photo by Tim Stepien

 

PBD veteran Elizabeth Dimon is ideal for the part of Audrey Batten, expressing a strong sense of nurturing, as she symbolically does with the feral cats she adopts around her rural oasis, while she deals with the indescribable pain of losing a child.  Dimon reaches into the depths of her character’s inner self to reveal hatred for the people who caused it, projecting a tough exterior to her daughter, Emma, and her good friend Douglas, as well as to herself.  She even finds redeemable virtues in her new rural neighbors, ones she would have normally dismissed as rednecks, but Audrey now sees just regular people, even artists among them. (“These people are out there in the real world,” she exclaims.)  Dimon effectively projects two personas, one nurturing, and the other an all-consuming rage.

Emma shares her mother’s grief about the loss of her brother, especially as they were twins.  She’s in the academic world as well, a poet, (“Nobody ever retired on a hit poem” she’s reminded by her mother). She frequently retreats to a support group in Newark, dealing with her pain and suffering over the death of her brother Eddie and her fear about what has happened to her mother, heretofore a rock of stability.  In her PBD debut as Emma, Caitlin Duffy effortlessly glides from tense scenes with her mother into talking to her support group, effectively delivering monologues to the group the audience imagines.

Emma’s favorite poet, Pablo Neruda, was known for his nightmarish surrealism.  Duffy skillfully projects her character’s sense of confused hopelessness.  She feels her world falling apart, her mother even buying a gun, taking target practice in the woods, Duffy channeling Emma’s incredulity: “Where did you get the gun?” Answer: ”Walmart. It’s America, Emma!”  Here is yet another layer to the play, the role guns play in the American sense of power.  Caitlin Duffy reaches real emotional depth on stage particularly at the denouement when she cries out “I need my mother!”  Audrey and Emma are then finally able to move towards one another in a healing reconciliation.

Elizabeth Dimon and John Leonard Thompson

 

And she’s not the only one who is worried about what has happened to Audrey Batten.  There is Douglas, her colleague and close friend, whose life in academia seems to have reached its own boiling point, bored and frustrated, considering stepping down.  He is not only a college administrator, but a priest and there is clever banter back and forth between him and the scientific thinker, Audrey.  He is incredulous that Audrey is living in such a ramshackle place, unkempt and looking like a bag lady.  It’s good to see John Leonard Thompson as Father Douglas Kelly back on the PBD stage again.  He is a gifted actor who can play a wide range of characters.  He is frightened for his friend and mines that concern in a somewhat fractious manner as only a skilled actor could do.

There are so many themes running through this inventive, moving play, but the arc is the divisiveness in this country that has only magnified since that unspeakable event of 9/11.  “Political correctness” permeates the timbre of discourse.  While the play ends with hope, what these characters go through to get to their resolution, will have the exiting audience wondering whether we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.  Can we endure?  Good theatre is universally relevant.  As Audrey so movingly articulates, throughout history every generation seems to have its crisis.  Isn’t at least one generation entitled to relax?  What is to become of our children and grandchildren living in constant tension?

J Barry Lewis, directs this play with a sure hand as always bringing his insightful intelligence into the action, always challenging with a world premiere.  This is his distinctive vision of the playwright’s intent, examining the issue of loss of a child by a parent, and the implications for a woman such as Audrey Batten.  He focuses on the power of anger to blind her to this new wrenching reality and her need to go through the stages of grief to find release.

 

The striking scenic design is by Michael Amico, who beautifully captures the rustic cabin with its dilapidated décor, reflecting on the sadness of the characters.  There are subtle atmospheric reminders of the Twin Towers with trident shapes embedded in the set.  The highly functional design has an outdoor so perfect for relocating action and of course where the feral cats visit.

Kirk Bookman’s lighting design shows the dappled leaves, changing to deeper colors of the fall, and follows the action from Audrey’s cabin to Emma’s therapy sessions with distinctive lighting changes. There is a cinematic flow, with no blackouts, making for highly effective theatre keeping the audience’s attention.

Sound design is by Roger Arnold who skillfully incorporates some subtle sounds of the rustic scene, some birds, cricket, and those of the feral cats.  His sound design signals Emma’s transition from the cabin into her group therapy in Newark, replete with urban sounds.  And there are the disturbing gunshots off stage as Audrey delights in her new-found “power.”

Award-winning Brian O’Keefe’s costumes reflect the times and the emotional state of the characters.  Audrey arrives at the cabin more professionally dressed but as her spirit hardens, and days turn, she slips into a disheveled state, both physically and emotionally.  Emma‘s numerous outfits are an eclectic, bohemian look but towards the end, as the characters reconcile, their dress becomes more harmonic.

The Duration by Bruce Graham is a highly relevant new play.  This is what Palm Beach Dramaworks does best: family dramas and, in this case, having had a hand in its development.  To see it all come together in the world premiere, from the initial readings, and now the fully staged version is nothing short of thrilling.  The Duration will surely be discovered by other theatres, so those in the West Palm Beach area can continue to see it at PBD through March 6.