Intimate Apparel

By (author) Lynn Nottage; By (author) Nottage Lynn
Short description/annotation:

Lynn Nottage''s Intimate Apparel is a multi-award-winning play about the empowerment of Esther, a seamstress in 1905 New York who creates exquisite lingerie for both Fifth Avenue boudoirs and Tenderloin bordellos.

Description:

Lynn Nottage''s Intimate Apparel is a multi-award-winning play about the empowerment of a black seamstress in New York City in 1905.

Esther sews exquisite lingerie for clients who range from wealthy white patrons to prostitutes. She has saved enough to allow her to dream of one day opening a beauty salon for black women, and at thirty-five years old, longs for a husband and a future. When she begins to receive beautiful letters from a lonesome Caribbean man who is working on the Panama Canal, it looks like life may be about to take a different course.

Intimate Apparel was first produced by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, and Centerstage in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2003, winning the New York Drama Critics'' Circle Award for Best Play and the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award. It received its UK premiere at the Theatre Royal Bath in 2014 before transferring to Park Theatre, London, the same year.

Review quote:

''Marvellous... quietly subversive, its recovery of lost lives makes this a defining piece of American drama''

Review quote:

''Finely wrought... [a] play tinged with love, warmth and lightness''

Review quote:

''Tender, illuminating... this warm, rich, complex tale will stay in the memory for a long time to come''

Review quote:

''An exceptionally gifted playwright''

Review quote:

''A thing of beauty''

Biographical note:
Lynn Nottage is a double Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: Clyde''s; Mlima''s Tale; Sweat (winner of the Pulitzer Prize); By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Ruined (winner of the Pulitzer Prize); Intimate Apparel; Fabulation; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por''knockers and POOF! Nottage was the recipient of the 2010 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, a MacArthur Foundation ''Genius'' Grant, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play (for Ruined), the Lee Reynolds Award and the Jewish World Watch iWitness Award. Her other honours include the Madge Evans and Sidney Kingsley Award, the National Black Theatre Festival''s August Wilson Playwriting Award, the 2005 Guggenheim Grant for Playwriting, the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award, and fellowships from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, the Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a co-founder and producer at Market Road Films LLC, a film production company.