THEATRE REVIEW: INTIMATE APPAREL
13 Feb'10

Designing a good fit

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In theatre, the most complex job often involves keeping things simple.

Certainly, that’s often the director’s principal chore, particularly in a show such as INTIMATE APPAREL, Lynn Nottage’s beautifully written and achingly touching story of a black seamstress in New York at the beginning of the last century. It’s a challenge that director Philip Akin shouldered with relish — and considerable success — in Obsidian Theatre’s 2008 production of the work. And it was, no doubt, largely due to Akin’s shaping of the work that Obsidian was subsequently invited to partner with Canadian Stage and remount the work on the stage of the much larger Bluma Appel Theatre, where it re-opened Thursday as part of the Canadian Stage subscription season.

For the uninitiated, it should be pointed out that transplanting a show into a larger theatre is a little more complex than transplanting a houseplant into a bigger pot. To do it effectively, a director and his cast and crew have to effectively rebuild the show from the ground up — a task made more difficult by the fact they are not simply trying to create a successful staging, but rather recreate it instead (and, with luck, improve it in the process). Happily, it’s a task to which Akin and his team prove more than equal on several fronts.

From a design perspective, for instance, Tamara Marie Kucheran’s multi-level, multi-locale set sits under the Bluma’s proscenium as if it was made for it, capturing 1905 New York from the boudoirs of the idle rich to the boarding houses, bars and brothels of Harlem and the tenements of the Lower East Side — with the same sprawling intimacy that marked the set in the earlier production.

All of which constitutes a milieu in move-in condition for Akin and an original cast, reunited to tell the story of Esther (Raven Dauda), a spinster seamstress, who has immersed herself in her work rather than court romance in a world where most suitors are so concerned with the sizzle that they too often overlook the steak.

In lieu of romance, she has built a career for herself, hand-crafting luxury undergarments, not just for the carriage trade, as represented by the tragic Mrs. Van Buren (played by Carly Street), but for working girls such as the amoral Mayme (Lisa Berry), for whom intimacy is simply business, as well. Esther’s faith and friendships with her landlady, Mrs. Dickson (Marium Carvell), and with Mr. Marks (Alex Poch-Goldin), an Orthodox Jew who is also a purveyor of fine fabric, round out her rather simple life.

Then, suddenly, Esther’s life is thrown into something akin to turmoil, when a letter arrives from a Caribbean-born black man, labouring on the construction of the Panama Canal. Mired in the dirt and disease of his working world, George (Kevin Hanchard) appears to be looking for something better. Esther dares to believe that she might offer it.

In reuniting his cast, Akin does some impressive work, maintaining a firm grip on the storyline and allowing the audience to revel in the exquisite language the playwright uses to tell it. But, too often, he allows the simple things to slip away. George’s Hanchard, swathed as he is in layer after layer of mosquito netting, still proves to be an unnecessary distraction throughout the entire first act, made too mysterious by half when simple back-lighting would probably accomplish much the same thing to better effect.

And sadly, while Dauda still turns in an impressive performance, she too often does even more embroidery on her work than Esther does on hers, anticipating her laughs and playing to them where once she played to her character’s simple dignity with impressive and deeply touching results.

Immersed as they are in their work, even truly great actors don’t always recognize the border between enough and too much — so most often, it’s simply up to the director to set them straight.