Getting Intimate with Intimate Apparel
By Caroline Woodson
In a dusty rose satin corset, hand-embroidered with blue thread, I stand on stage and complain about my husband’s lack of interest in me and our aging marriage. A Gibson bun wig tacked onto my head, white fur trim nestled into my slippers, I spill my secrets to my seamstress. In my intimates, I talk about the lack of intimacy in my life.
Intimate Apparel is a play by Lynn Nottage that investigates the personal relationships, topics, and moments that are normally kept hidden away.
In Virginia Commonwealth University’s Production of this play, I portrayed one of the side characters in the plot, Mrs. Van Buren. Intimate Apparel centers around a Black seamstress in America in 1905, Esther Mills. Throughout the play, audiences get to see the various people in Esther’s life: her dearest friend (Mayme), the owner of her boarding house (Mrs. Dickson), the Romanian Jewish man who sells her fabric (Mr. Marks), the man who decides to write to her from Panama (George), and the white woman she makes corsets for (Mrs. Van Buren). As Esther goes through her day-to-day life with these people, we see the ways she binds herself to all of them. By sewing personalized pieces for all these characters, she is stitching her presence into their lives. 
Intimate Apparel is actually a work of creative nonfiction. This play is based on the playwright’s own great grandmother who worked as a seamstress in New York City. The play ends each of its two acts with simple photographs. These photographs show the only bits of history that remain of this beautiful, heart-wrenching story. Since African Americans were deprived of the right to write for so long, many personal histories have been lost as years have gone by. Nottage, the playwright, throws the audience into the busy life of Esther Mills as she repairs prostitutes’ gowns, purchases hand-dyed silk and writes love letters to a man she has never met. Once the viewers are attached to Esther, Nottage shows that all that is physically left of this story is simple photographs, that so many important lives have been lost with time.
As Esther goes through her day-to-day life with these people, we see the ways she binds herself to all of them. By sewing personalized pieces for all these characters, she is stitching her presence into their lives.
Lynn Nottage has had a myriad of shows on Broadway in the last four months: Clyde’s, MJ (The Michael Jackson Musical), and an opera adaptation of Intimate Apparel itself. Nottage is the first, and only, woman to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two different times. Lynn Nottage studied at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, focusing on playwriting. Intimate Apparel is one of her most known and lauded works.
VCU put on Intimate Apparel from February 18th to 27th, 2022. With a main cast of 6 actors and their 6 understudies acting as an ensemble, the actors of VCUarts transported audiences back to American life in 1905 with its rigid expectations and its more restrictive corsets. The Broadway Opera adaptation of this story closed on March 5th, 2022. However, PBS recorded this production and will be streaming it through their Great Performances series in the upcoming weeks.