Lynn Nottage came to the attention of most American theatre critics after her short one-act Poof! was awarded a Heideman Prize and produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival. It was recently made into a 45-minute film for PBS. The 10-minute stage version, funny and philosophical all at once, opens with a woman standing over a pile of ashes which is all that remains of her husband. She’s awed and guilty because she had wished him struck dead—never realizing her wish would be granted.
A Brown University and Yale School of Drama graduate, Nottage still lives in her native Brooklyn, where she and her husband raise their daughter, Ruby. The playwright’s literary offspring—a wide-ranging, provocative handful of plays—are also jewels. From Por’ Knockers (1995), in which four African-American and one Jewish activist debate the efficacy of violence after blowing up an FBI building, to Las Meninas (2000), about the wife of Louis XIV, who has a child with the court’s royal fool, an African dwarf, Nottage confronts the social, political, and racial divisions in America. Often she does this with humor and grace, which she has in abundance when she sits down to talk to Front & Center.
Another seed was my fascination with period lingerie. I had a great-grandmother who made “intimate apparel” at the turn of the century. That always intrigued me. She came to New York in 1912 and made intimate apparel for African-American and white women. I was always curious about how she felt entering the various boudoirs and worlds of women very different from herself. What did she see? How did it shape her sensibilities? How did she feel about the corset? How did she change the way women saw themselves?
“One of the things that particularly fascinated me about the turn of the century is that it was an era before psychoanalysis. It was before people really understood feelings and desires and had a language to talk about them.”
Can you talk about your research for Intimate Apparel?
NOTTAGE: I spent a lot of time looking at lingerie books of the period. I have a love-hate relationship with the corset. I also did a lot of research on the Panama Canal and African-Americans in early New York. I found that one of the best resources was the newspapers of the period, in particular the classified ads and announcements. Those items gave me a sense of ordinary life: what people were wearing, what people were paying for the items that they wore, where they were going, what people desired, and what things were important to them. All those details helped me shape the play, the small details that the eye might brush over upon first glance. The fact is that very little information has been preserved about the lives of ordinary African-Americans in early New York. So I had to go to unusual lengths to find my characters.
Tell me about how some of your other plays use history…
NOTTAGE: Las Meninas is about the romance between Queen Marie-Therese, the wife of Louis XIV, and an African dwarf. I spent a great deal of time researching the court of Louis XIV. I savored the process, because I felt as if I was rediscovering a part of history that had been erased. I was excavating. And I consider myself probably THE foremost expert in the world on the relationship between Queen Marie-Therese and Nabo, the court’s African dwarf.
Some playwrights claim they see the play in their mind; others hear voices and dialogue. Do you fall into either camp?
NOTTAGE: For me it varies. This play really arose from a feeling… a feeling of resignation epitomized by Esther, a 35-year-old woman with limited options. That was my starting point. I wanted to capture that feeling of resignation. And Esther simply began to explain her story to me.
But the process is different with each play. It really depends on the things I’m exploring: whether it’s a drama or a comedy; whether it’s plot heavy or character driven. With Intimate Apparel, I wrote the first and last scene with great ease, so I knew the entire arc of the play. The joy for me was filling in the colors and listening to the slow beautiful aria that Esther was singing to me.
Esther goes through tremendous changes in the play. We see Esther resign herself to living alone, without love, but then witness her reawakening through her long distance love affair with a stranger in Panama…
NOTTAGE: Well, that’s the journey she takes. I don’t want to give away the ending because I want people to see it—so don’t read this part if you want a complete surprise. But for me the big journey of the play is that it begins with this woman sitting at a sewing machine. For her, it’s a symbol of imprisonment. By the end of the play, she’s taken a journey in which, when she sits down to sew, the same machine has become a symbol of her liberation. She has a completely different relationship to her work. So it ends exactly where it begins but everything has changed in tiny little ways… and in big ways. Part of the reason I wrote this play is that I was interested in the poetry of everyday moments in ordinary life, in the simple gestures that define us and the way that unspoken things keep us from moving forward.
A lot of that is really clear in Esther’s scenes with Mr. Marks, the orthodox Jewish businessman who sells her the fancy fabrics she needs to make her lingerie. In those scenes there’s clearly so much going on between them that is unspoken.
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Viola Davis plays the role of Esther in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel.
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NOTTAGE: One of the things that particularly fascinated me about the turn of the century is that it was an era before psychoanalysis. It was before people really understood the nature of their feelings and desires. They just felt—and had a limited vocabulary to share those feelings. You find people with complicated emotions, but they can’t express themselves because the language simply didn’t exist yet. So they have to find an alternative means of expression.
Esther and Mr. Marks do it through touch and the exploration of the fabric. That’s how they express their forbidden love. The two are interesting because they’re so close and yet so far apart; or maybe it’s the other way around. They’re obviously from different worlds, but they’ve found a common ground and a remarkable level of intimacy.
The play also has this very interesting socio-political dimension because the two women Esther makes lingerie for are so different. One’s white and rich; the other is a black singer and a prostitute. But both of whom want to be in each other’s skin. What were you trying to communicate with that?
NOTTAGE: I was more interested in the language and the things that connected these women, more so than the things that separated them. There are issues of class and race that come into play, and definitely an economic divide, but I think these women—Esther and Mrs. Van Buren—are drawn together by their humanity. It’s society that has forced them to live separate lives. Society has placed labels on them—it has defined who they are. They can occupy the same space only when one is serving the other but they can’t have a friendship that exists outside or beyond there.
I was thinking about Esther’s two customers, Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme. The two women obliquely know of each other but never meet. But they really want everything the other one…
NOTTAGE: Mrs. Van Buren covets the freedom and sexual liberation of Mayme, while Mayme covets the legitimacy and the wealth and the place in society that Mrs. Van Buren enjoys.
Is there anything else that’s autobiographical in the play beside the character of Esther?
NOTTAGE: Yes, there is. My great grandmother met my great grandfather through correspondence. Like George Armstrong, who Esther corresponds with, he was working on the Panama Canal. My great grandmother came to New York and needed to find a husband and they started corresponding and he came over and they married. That much is autobiographical.
The play has been produced at a number of theatres, including the two that commissioned it. When you saw it onstage, did the way the script played surprise or shock you?
NOTTAGE: I was surprised by the difficulty some actors had playing the unspoken moments. I think it’s easier in some ways for actors to just grab each other and kiss than to stand onstage very closely, look each other in the eyes, and figure out a way to say I love you without physically touching. When I set out to write this play I was specifically interested in the space between the lines and the way in which a silence can be filled.
You were looking for a stillness…
NOTTAGE: I was definitely looking for stillness. I think that is the single most difficult thing to achieve in theatre.
John Istel is the Editor of Front & Center and writes frequently about the arts.
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