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    Theater Review: Gallery Players’ ‘Intimate Apparel’ Shines a Light on the Black Working Class of the Early 20th Century

    Gallery Players open 2023 with a beloved play by one of the great American voices, Lynn Nottage. Intimate Apparel, sensitively directed by Julie Whitney-Scott, looks at the early 1900s Black community and the way women are boxed in and squeezed out by men and societal expectations.

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    Based around two photographs that end each act, captioned with “Unidentified,” Intimate Apparel seeks to reclaim space for these lives and make them specific. After being orphaned, Esther (Latifat Sulaimon) made her way to New York and, while living in Mrs. Dickson’s (Cathy Bean) boarding house, hones a talent in sewing to turn out exquisite garments, mostly the intimate apparel of the title, for a combination of wealthy patrons like Mrs. Van Buren (Ella Palardi) and friends like prostitute/entertainer Mayme (Brooklyn Smith).

    Esther nourishes dreams of opening a beauty parlor, and socking money away while also nourishing a dream of a specific love after watching the other boarders from Dickson’s house get married away. She falls into a dreamy correspondence with George Armstrong (El-Ryck Kendrick), a Caribbean man working on the Panama Canal, with Van Buren writing her side of the letters; and a dream of being seen as a person by the wider world, focused through Jewish garment district merchant Mr. Marks (Jacob Erney), with an attraction they both know they can’t consummate.

    Intimate Apparel isn’t particularly focused on plot – what turns there are, the play telegraphs far in advance – it’s setting a tone and an ambiance, drawing a picture of a 1905 New York that isn’t looked at or talked about much. And for me, much of that scene setting and the micro, scene-by-scene and sentence-by-sentence, level of detail is enthralling. The hyper-specific, chiseled word choice is one of the elements that first drew me to Nottage’s work and it gets an excellent showcase here.

    The trouble is, the production often drifts from a pace that’s stately to one that’s just slow. This is inexact because the intermission was extended due to technical difficulties, but I’m pretty sure this was two hours and 30 minutes long; the first act clocked at an hour and 20. The transitions between scenes on a large stage (featuring an excellent set by Moo Cow LLC), take so long that we watch tension dissipate and the actors have to start back from square one over and over again, burning energy that could have kept the audience engaged.

    Gallery Players' 'Intimate Apparel' - Photo by Jerri Shafer
    Gallery Players’ ‘Intimate Apparel’ – Photo by Jerri Shafer

    Many of the performances are fascinating examples of focus and restraint. Sulaimon finds a remarkable amount of nuance in Esther, a character for whom the sole flaw we see is an outsized belief in people – the one bad decision she makes comes from a place of love and generosity – and what she can do with the raise of an eyebrow or a change of inflection, is a wonder. Kendrick’s George makes the most of subtle physicality, charm and menace, which are always underpinned by the simultaneous hope that things are on the verge of turning around and the unshakable, nagging feeling that they never will. That mirror, what they do with hope and talent, and how they deal with their dreams deferred is the engine powering the play, and we get excellent examples of those characters.

    Palardi’s Van Buren and Smith’s Mayme have a similar paralleled quality, most obvious when they appear beside Esther and George’s martial bed with a flurry of similar but skewed questions. Mayme’s piano pounding, leaning into the moment qualities, have a similar fury to Van Buren’s caged-bird marriage, and they lean on Esther – and the undergarments – for a similar hope things can be better.

    Erney’s Marks has an interesting, tentative quality I’m not sure I’ve quite seen in a character, his geeky, giddy passion for fabric, shared with Esther, and the way that bumps up against society’s expectations – the character mentions an arranged marriage and a bride back in eastern Europe – is an interesting approach. That take gets bolstered by interesting direction choices, such as watching the character get progressively disheveled and the moments where, in accordance with Rabbinical law, he can’t touch her so they both touch fabric. Bean’s Dickson brings kindness to the boarding house owner and a reminder that life doesn’t have to be nasty, brutish and short and that there are good people in the world despite evidence to the contrary.

    The flip side of that is the performances are so tasteful and restrained that with the pacing, they blur into the overall static quality of the piece. The circular structure, where none of the relationships really change from where they are in the beginning, adds to that feeling of stasis like nothing happens. It ends up feeling even longer than it is.

    That said, despite those frustrations, much of the audience I saw it with on Sunday afternoon loved it. Large chunks of the audience actively booed Kendrick during the curtain call, so incensed by his character. Only once in years have I seen that kind of visceral response to a character, and that was the recent Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog. Anything evoking that kind of passion should be recognized, even if I had a harder time embracing the piece than I would have liked.

    Intimate Apparel runs through February 12, with performances at 7 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit columbusjcc.org/intimate-apparel.

    Gallery Players' 'Intimate Apparel' - Photo by Jerri Shafer
    Gallery Players’ ‘Intimate Apparel’ – Photo by Jerri Shafer
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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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