Since Lynn Nottage’s first major play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, opened in 1995, Nottage has become one of the most significant original voices in the American theatre. She began to receive acclaim and national attention with the 2004 Off-Broadway premiere of Intimate Apparel, which featured Viola Davis as Esther. In 2004, Intimate Apparel won an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and an AUDELCO Viv Award, which recognizes excellence in African American theatre. In 2007, Nottage received the MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship, the same year that she traveled to Africa to research and develop her play Ruined, which earned Nottage the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2017, Nottage became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice with the play Sweat. Nottage is known for her extensive and immersive research process and her ability to humanize and highlight the issues of oppressed people.

Nottage was inspired to write Intimate Apparel when, while sifting through her late grandmother’s belongings, she came across an old photograph of her great grandmother. Nottage’s great grandmother was, like Esther, a seamstress who married an immigrant from Barbados, but Nottage knew little else about her and no longer had any living family who could fill in the gaps. Intimate Apparel became an imagined history, giving flesh, nuance, and depth to a lost family history. The play is about voices that have been silenced over time, particularly the everyday lives of marginalized people, which are often neglected and forgotten. Intimate Apparel is one of Nottage’s most widely produced plays. In 2020, an opera adaptation with a libretto by Nottage and a score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon opened at Lincoln Center.

Plot Summary

Intimate Apparel takes place in 1905 Manhattan and tells the story of Esther, a 35-year-old African American seamstress who makes expertly crafted lingerie. Esther is lonely, but fears that she is not attractive enough to find love. However, she has saved up a large sum of money and plans to use it to fulfill her other dream of opening a salon. One day she receives a letter from a man she doesn’t know, an African Caribbean laborer named George Armstrong who acquired her information from a mutual acquaintance. George is in Panama, one of the many workers toiling to build the Panama Canal, and he sends poetic letters. Esther cannot read or write, but a lonely upper-class housewife who commissions intimate apparel from Esther helps her to write back to him.

Although Esther has feelings for Mr. Marks, the Orthodox Jewish man who sells her fabric and clearly returns her feelings, his religion and prior arranged marriage make it impossible for them to be together. When George sends a letter proposing marriage to Esther, she accepts, and at the end of the first act they finally meet and are married. George in reality is different from the George in his letters. George is cruel and manipulative, spending Esther’s savings on alcohol and prostitutes. Finally, George coerces Esther to give him all of her money and leaves her. Esther moves back to the boarding house, wiser and hopeful for a better future.