by KYW's Bob Nelson
"Intimate Apparel," a popular new play by Lynn Nottage, is receiving its area premiere by the Philadelphia Theatre Company at Plays & Players in center city Philadelphia.
It's set in Manhattan in 1905, a time when new arrivals were joining other lost souls searching for identity in a class-conscious society.
The play is a sentimental, somewhat overworked portrait of a gifted African-American seamstress who's worked her way up from the South to become a creator of fashionable lingerie for well-heeled white women, as well as for ladies of the evening (black and white).
The playwright tells us that she fashioned her drama from a photo of her great-grandmother, whom she assumed might be such a woman.
Unfortunately, the characters in this play seem cut from familiar dramatic cloth -- the motherly landlady in our heroine's rooming house; a friendly, unhappily-married white woman; the chatty, black musician-prostitute; and the Jewish merchant who supplies the cloth and a desire for a closer relationship.
Then we have that dead-end marriage of our heroine and the handsome Barbadian laborer.
It's an inventively-staged production with a strong cast -- especially Rosalyn Coleman as Esther (seated in photo), our central lost soul who, in "Intimate Apparel," may have lost her man but maintains her self respect and her craft.
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