Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage
J.K. Curry
Wake Forest University: North California
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Title
Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage
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Publication Information
Dramatists Play Service, New York, 2005. Also available in Intimate Apparel/Fabulation (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2006)
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Abstract
Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage clearly fits into the category of work that gets produced. Following the commissioning and first production by South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa) and Center Stage (Baltimore), Intimate Apparel was produced in New York by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2004. It then topped the Theatre Communication Group list of most produced plays by member theatres in 2005-2006 with 16 productions and made the top ten again for the 2006-2007 season. The play won several awards, including the 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and raised the profile of Nottage who was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2007. Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Ruined further enhances her status as recognized and produced playwright.
Intimate Apparel appeals to producers and a wide audience, while utilizing an African-American woman as protagonist and a feminist perspective on several issues raised by the story. With its accessible narrative, this is a history play that speaks easily to contemporary issues and features a relatively small (affordable) mixed race cast. Nottage’s stage directions call for both acts of her play to end with simulated photographs, captioned “Unidentified Negro Couple” and “Unidentified Negro Seamstress, ca. 1905,” indicating her project of giving voice to figures not fully documented in the historical record. The play’s feminist perspective is also seen in a concern with the regulation of desire—especially restrictions based on race, religion, and gender—and consideration of the ways money/social class/power intersect with intimacy and sexuality. As in Nottage’s Fabulation, this play also challenges and complicates the negative cultural stereotype of the unwed black mother. The final powerful image of the play is of a resilient, self-reliant, economically independent woman.
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Biographical Note
Dr. J.K. Curry is an associate professor and incoming chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers, John Guare: A Research and Production Sourcebook and the essay “Rachel Crothers: An Exceptional Woman in a Man’s World” in Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History (edited by Marra and Schanke). She is currently serving as the editor of Theatre Symposium. She teaches a variety of theatre history and dramatic literature courses, including a course on women playwrights, and recently directed a university production of Intimate Apparel.
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