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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At the final beat of Lynn Nottage's subtle and compelling "Intimate Apparel" (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the Laura Pels), the stage picture freezes on the heroine, a thirty-five-year-old seamstress named Esther Mills (Viola Davis), hunched over her sewing machine. Projected above the proscenium are the words "Unidentified Negro Seamstress Ca. 1905." This photographic trope is an answer, half a century later, to Zora Neale Hurston's provocative contention that "the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America." Hurston, who denounced "the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes," argued that in the "American Museum of Unnatural History" only the stories of quaint or exceptional black people are preserved.
Here, in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan, who matches Nottage's understatement with his own deft insight, the fine emotional filigree of an ordinary black life and the social forces that shape it is suggestively revealed. Esther is neither a victim nor a champion of her race; she is just a plain, hardworking Christian woman with talent and a sense of beauty. "I'm afraid it was either learn to sew or turn back sheets for fifty cents a day," she explains to Mr. Marks (Corey Stoll), the Jewish merchant who sells her cloth and shares her passion for texture and craftsmanship. That understanding, acquired when she was seventeen, is what has elevated Esther above the servant class, providing her with both the mobility...
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