Intimate Apparel

by Lynn Nottage
   
The Utah Shakespeare Festival 2021

Director: Tasia A. Jones
Scenic Designer: Stephen Jones
Costume Designer: Raquel Adorno
Lighting Designer: Donna Ruzika
Sound Designer, Music Adaptations: Joe Payne
Projection Designer: Joe Payne
Intimacy Director: Caitlin Herzlinger

“Esther is a single African-American woman in early 1900s Manhattan who has sewn her way out of poverty stitch by stitch, creating fine lingerie for her wealthy clientele. But she is alone and cautiously exchanging love letters with a Panama Canal laborer on his way to New York, despite mutual tender affections with her Jewish cloth merchant. This warm, heart-rending play gently weaves an intricate tapestry of our human need for intimacy while exploring social divisions of race, religion, equality, and class.”

Lynn Nottage crafted a powerfully emotional piece though the eyes of a black seamstress. The acts end with photos of the the seamstress and her new husband she had just met before marrying with the following captions: “Unidentified Negro Couple ca. 1905” and “Unidentified Negro Seamstress ca. 1905. It was important for Lynn give voice to the nameless. It was important to the production team to follow the Black Lives Matter movement and give name to the voiceless; to “Say Her Name.”  In a play centered around the creation of corsets, Lynn labeled each scene with the fabric and patterns described in the scenes. We decided to depict those patterns and fabrics as abstractions on the theatre’s proscenium along with Lynn’s scene titles during transitions. Projections were also used to accentuate Esther’s fantasy of George as he read love letters from Panama. Sound also supported these moments with the textures of an imagined panama and its digging machines. The sound design included the music of Scott Joplin and Amy Beach, creating the iconic sound of ragtime and romantic piano music, much of which was expressed through Mayme’s onstage piano playing.

Design Collage

Give Me a Man, words by Lynn Nottage, melody by Joe Payne, adapted from Scott Joplin’s Peacherine Rag. Demo includes the voice of WRENNE.

⬆︎ Projection Composite Examples  ⬇︎ Production Shots. 

Anes Theatre Speaker/Projector Plot.pdf, Anes Theatre Block Diagram.pdf, Sound/Projection Cue Plot.pdf

_{Photos by Karl Hugh. Copyright Utah Shakespeare Festival 2021. Afua Busia as Esther, Yao Dogbe as George, Constance V Swain as Mayme, Josh Innerst as Mr. Marks, Jasmine Bracey as Mrs. Dickson, Tiffany Scott as Mrs. Van Buren.}