By ANNA O'DONOGHUE

If you missed Lynn Nottage's play Intimate Apparel when it had its New York premiere at the Roundabout two years ago, you might have regretted it. Hailed by critics, the piece swept the theatrical awards and—even more unusual—took the country by storm. A period drama inspired by the playwright's family history, Intimate Apparel quickly made its way onto college, community, and regional stages from Denver to Los Angeles to Louisville, becoming the most produced play of the 2005-06 national season. Now it is back in New York, in the Juilliard Drama Theater, and you have another opportunity to see it, as the fourth-year actors bring to new life the historical tale that has so captivated contemporary audiences.

Costume sketches for Intimate Apparel’s Mayme by costume designer Junghyun Georgia Lee.

Set in the Lower East Side of New York in 1905, Intimate Apparel introduces us to Esther Mills, an African-American seamstress who makes her living sewing expertly crafted undergarments for ladies of all echelons. For 18 years, Esther has lived in the same boarding house for women, watching as the other girls marry and move on. But Esther is devoted entirely to her work, fiercely proud of her independence, and is diligently socking away money for her dream of someday opening a beauty shop where "colored ladies … get pampered and treated real nice. 'Cause no one does it for us." Gifted, painstaking, and discrete, she has acquired a loyal clientele, from the elegant Mrs. Van Buren, who hopes Esther's beautiful corsets will entice her distant husband, to Mayme, a talented pianist and prostitute, who has a different use for them.

The daughter of freed slaves, Esther loves her work; when she picked up a needle, she "discovered all I needed in these fingers." But as she reaches the milestone of her 35th birthday, her virginity and spinsterhood still firmly intact,

Costume sketches for George by costume designer Junghyun Georgia Lee.

she begins to feel she may need something more. A letter from a romantically minded and articulate worker on the Panama Canal ignites a new hope for connection. Though Esther is illiterate and cannot reply to the letters, her clients are more than willing to help; together, they spin a fantasy courtship. All the while, Esther fights a deep attraction to her fabric supplier, an Orthodox Jew who shares her sensual appreciation for silks—but who has a bride he has never met waiting for him in his native Romania.

As people and possibilities weave through Esther's life, the play grapples with loneliness, new self-knowledge, and the sexual and racial taboos of a complicated and changing time. Lynn Nottage calls her own play "deceptively simple" and Leah Gardiner, who will direct Juilliard's production, agrees. "There's a lot that happens in the silences, in the unsaid; it leaves tremendous room for the imagination of the audience to fill it in," says Gardiner. "It's really an extremely and exquisitely poetic piece, and like any good poem, it knows not to say too much—but the words that are chosen trigger other images and ideas and leave you with something very personal."

Although Gardiner is a friend of the playwright, this is her first experience with Intimate Apparel—"I was out of town when it was in New York, though I had read the play and loved it," she explains—and she is eager to explore it with fresh eyes. "I haven't even seen anyone else's set," she says.

Gardiner's approach began with the title. "That's always an important way in for me, and I think the fact that this piece is named Intimate Apparel is very significant," she says. "I wanted to understand what that meant at the turn of the century, and what that means to each of the characters individually; it was my way of beginning to understand the people in this story and the way their world is shaped."

Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel Drama Theater Thursday, Dec. 14-Monday, Dec. 18 Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

In a play called Intimate Apparel, obviously the costumes are crucial (in fact, the playwright titles each scene with the name of a specific fabric), but the title also led Gardiner to her concept for the set. The script specifies that the scenes take place in various "boudoirs," and while the term "boudoir" can encompass any sort of sitting or dressing room, Gardiner and her designers felt that there had to be beds present, with all their implied privacy and danger.

Intimate Apparel, like the garments Esther so painstakingly sews, is a finely crafted and immensely detailed piece, allowing for and demanding deep exploration and interpretation by the artists involved. Gardiner calls this work "excavation"—probing through the text to search out the hints that Nottage has left about characters and moments. "The play is so well constructed and researched that the clues are all there, but it can be difficult to really understand the worlds that the play presents: the foreign languages, the accents, this time when women wore corsets and men moved differently and the world was changing so much." These characters live in a time of enormous contradiction: People were still very bound by social structures and oppressions, but a wave of freedom was beginning to sweep through the country. Slaves had just been emancipated, the suffragette movement was burgeoning, immigration was booming, even the lines of the corsets were getting lower. And the characters of

Costume sketches for Intimate Apparel’s Mrs. Dickson by costume designer Junghyun Georgia Lee.

Intimate Apparel are all standing on a precipice of new experience and awareness—even as their feet are tied and their waists are cinched by convention.

Gardiner is interested in exploring all those contradictions of the time, and glad to have the opportunity. "It's really exciting and invigorating to work on a contemporary historical play, to know that writers today are thinking about the past and how to put it onstage," she says. "And it's a wonderful challenge for the actors to take themselves out of the contemporary and go back." She has the utmost enthusiasm and confidence in her cast's ability to meet that challenge: "The level of talent is extraordinary. They're all fantastic; they each bring such a different light to their roles and the story, and hopefully all those lights will blend together and we'll have something very beautiful."

Anna O'Donoghue is a fourth-year drama student. She played Nora in a recent Juilliard production of A Doll's House.