McCarter's 'Intimate Apparel': Loneliness, touch, and a golden thread

For all its period accuracy, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, at the McCarter Theatre through June 4, is above all a deeply moving play about isolation and the search for touch. Inspired by the story of Nottage's great-grandmother, who came from Barbados to New York to work as a seamstress, it's in line with Nottage's mission, to speak for the "memoir-less" people of our history.

But a play is not a research paper, not a sermon, and Intimate Apparel would be less if this American tale were not so empathetically told, or the performances less memorable.

It's 1905. European immigrants flood Manhattan, pressuring the African American population, already there thanks to the post-slavery migrations. With its stairs, back alleys, and compartments, the brilliant set by Alexis Distler embodies social compartmentalization and social chaos. Black men can't get work, but a black woman such as Esther – played with epic soul by Quincy Tyler Bernstine – can. She can create clothing ("It was as if God touched my hands," she says) and earn a living. As a less threatening other, she can cross boundaries, work with all sorts of people.

Esther brightens the tragedies of others. She makes corsets for Mrs. Van Buren, a sexually balked, abandoned upper-class wife ("We are ridiculous creatures sometimes"). Another customer is the merry prostitute Mayme, who plays a mean ragtime piano – Jessica Frances Dukes gives the role heart. Esther buys cloth wholesale from an Orthodox Jew from Romania, Mr. Marks. In a city where millions are grindingly isolated, all look forward to Esther, but none can touch her.

At 35, illiterate, a virgin, Esther is afraid she will never know marriage or motherhood. Bernstine as Esther is tough yet naïve, self-sufficient yet aching for love, a hireling yet an artist. She plays Esther as poised but not poetic; she draws poetry from others. There is poetry, too, in her somewhat predictable story of chosen mistakes. George, a Panama Canal worker who trades letters with her (letters other people must both read and write for them), is resonant, doomed, and lyrical in the hands of Galen Kane. Brenda Pressley sparkles as the gossipy, maternal boarding-house owner Mrs. Dickson, and Kate MacCluggage is by turns wistful and pathetic as Mrs. Van Buren.

But the golden thread sewn through this play, when walls fall and we're alone with human truth, is Esther's tie with Mr. Marks, played with eloquent restraint by Tasso Feldman. Sensual, aesthetic, they communicate through their shared love of fabric. When she hesitates to buy, he says, "Touch first, then refuse." They touch cloth, but not each other: They share the thrill of workmanship, the story of a fabric's making, the promise of what it could make. It's the play's one truly genius tapestry. Bernstine and Feldman elevate the drama beyond time and place.

To be honest, you can see what's going to happen, with each relationship, right away. What remains is the unraveling. But Intimate Apparel overcomes, thanks to Bernstine's steady grace and that one golden thread.

Intimate Apparel. Through June 4 at McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton. Tickets: $25-$96.50. Information: 609-258-2787 or mccarter.org