Intimate Apparel

Methodological Approach(es): 

Director's Statement

Layers. Limitations. Liberation.    

Intimate Apparel began as a recombination of a  fictitious family story about Lynn Nottage’s great-grandmother’s life as an African American seamstress in the early twentieth century and a photograph of “a beautiful white wedding corset embossed with orange blossoms.” It is a history play that necessarily and importantly does not recount its period and history but rather creates the past. The play’s characters are made up of those overlooked by traditional history: stories scarcely told and identities slandered by socio-cultural stereotypes and prejudices.    

Our redefining of Nottage’s breathtaking text aims to comb out the desires within and expose them at their seams. I’ve come to describe our production as a patchwork quilt of woven narratives stitched together over time through the themes of gender, race and class, and religion. We seek to open a space within which to examine, through a different lens, the silhouettes of the “history of the present” and its complicated tensions wrought of contradictory desires. In so doing, the thoughts that begin these notes blossoms into a bigger question: who’s history are we creating on stage? A migrating dreamer from the South? An immigrant’s journey? An ex-slave’s? High maiden of society? A “lady of the night”?

For the past 6 weeks, the entire cast and production team have diligently rehearsed, revised, and rehearsed again still within the confines of a pandemic wrought world: adding our own revisions to Nottage’s play and the play, in turn, has restitched our thoughts, self-conceptions, and worldviews. Theatre is rooted in personal intimate interaction - it is a society within itself, a microcosm of society as a whole.