“Intimate Apparel” Fails to Connect with Audience at Times ― But They Don’t Seem to Mind

Tone can be a slippery thing. Small differences in interpretation or delivery can determine whether you take your audience where you want to go or route them to a completely different destination.

Several times during the Long Beach Playhouse’s preview of Intimate Apparel, the audience was nowhere near playwright Lynn Nottage’s plotted location; nonetheless, they enjoyed the trip. So was this a successful show? If not, who’s at fault? 

Esther (Alisha Elaine Anderson) has had nary a day’s rest since age 9. By the sweat of her brow she’s raised herself up from rural deprivation to living in a Lower Manhattan boardinghouse and working as a seamstress for a wealthy White socialite (Allison Lynn Adams) who treats her, if not like an equal, at least with friendly openness. Not bad for a single young Black woman in 1905. But Esther modestly dreams of more. She wants to open a beauty salon for Black women, for which she’s squirreling away dollar after hard-earned dollar. She wants a man to love her, so despite her illiteracy she’s undertaken an epistolary romance with George (James F. Webb III), a seemingly sweet laborer on the Panama Canal. 

Structurally, Intimate Apparel doesn’t cover a lot of ground. Act One establishes Esther’s relationships — including with her landlady (Robyn Hastings), her best friend (Rena Bobbs), and a Jewish clothier (Taylor Gross) — and gets her to the altar (her first face-to-face meeting with the groom), and Act Two is mostly (surprise!) wedded life being not what she’d hoped. 

But rather than take you on a big journey, Nottage wants you to experience the frustration and heartbreak of not really being able — due to tradition or circumstance or your own failings and fears — to move forward. This isn’t true just for Esther but for all six characters. And although each of them speechifies a bit to let us know about their particular holding pattern, there’s no denying a certain successful subtlety in how Nottage makes this the play’s overarching theme.

But director Brooke Aston Harper seems to think otherwise. In her program notes she mentions only Esther and names among the themes “how [Esther] moves on from disappointments” and “how she remains hopeful,” even though Nottage not-so-subtly ends the play by putting Esther literally right back where she started in Act One, worse for wear and with a dimmer future than the one that ever so faintly gleamed in her eye a year earlier. 

Is this questionable take on the material why the LB Playhouse audience didn’t dial in? Or could it be in the acting? Harper has Alisha Elaine Anderson play almost all of Esther’s dialog in one of two modes, restrained and upset, neither with much nuance within the moment. It’s that there aren’t real-life people with limited affect and nuance that’s tough to spot; but in this case it’s not always enough to reel us in. (It could be that Anderson can’t summon nuance Harper wants, but a couple of misses by the supporting cast are clearly things Harper let slip by, so….) 

If the only measure of a performance’s success is audience enjoyment, then Harper and company should feel great. But what about the fact that a good chunk of this enjoyment makes it clear that the patrons were not fully dialed in to Nottage’s words?

At first I didn’t notice. Although by no means a comedy, Intimate Apparel has its fair share of humor, and the audience was yukking it up. I wasn’t laughing, sure, but I’m a tough sell — and there was nothing especially unfunny in the jokes. But eventually I realized that a lot of the laughs were coming seemingly at random, sometimes on the heels of the play’s heaviest lines. “My parents were chattel,” George tells Esther on their wedding night, “and their parents were chattel. We cut sugarcane and die, cut sugarcane and die.” A full one-third of the audience guffawed — I have no idea why. Harper may have missed the main theme, but she never has her cast playing gravity for humor. It was always clear to me where the jokes were, but the audience was often off-course emotionally, even if they were having a gay ol’ time on the way.

The LB Playhouse crew created a detailed space for Intimate Apparel to unfold. Although the action would have been better served by multiple sets, the mise en scène doesn’t lack for detail, from rich old wood to lacy weaves to a piano sound that cleverly moves from the house speakers in the scene break down to the piano that is its ostensible source when the lights come up. The audience may not consciously notice such touches, but they make a difference regarding how deeply we dive into the onstage world.

Why a lot of the audience wasn’t always immersed in the play’s intended emotions is a mystery to me. Usually I’d blame the writer and/or the troupe; here, their shortcomings don’t account for the disconnect. But an audience don’t know what it don’t know, and this one came away satisfied. So, er, all’s well that ends well?

Long Beach Playhouse presents Intimate Apparel

Time: Friday–Saturday 8:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 p.m. through June 18.

Address: 5021 E. Anaheim St.

Cost: $14 to $24.

Details: (562) 494-1014 or visit LBplayhouse.org

COVID safety protocols include mandatory masking throughout the duration (three hours, with two intermissions), plus proof of vaccination or a negative test result within the prior 48 hours.