Reviews for Intimate Apparel/Fabulation

The average rating for Intimate Apparel/Fabulation based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-07 00:00:00 Judson Spangler I was already excited that Lynn Nottage's Sweat (a play about people in a hard hit deindustrialized town) was on the list for the Pittsburgh Public Theater's season when I came across these two earlier plays by her. Although Intimate Apparel won all kinds of awards in the early 2000s and featured Viola Davis, I had never heard of it, so it was my first journey into Nottage's work. It was a rewarding trip. Both plays, in very different ways, deal with race and class, and are full of nuance. Intimate Apparel is more somber and thoughtful. Fabulation is more madcap and manic. In Intimate Apparel, Esther is a seamstress living in a New York boarding house in the early 1900s when a man working on the Panama Canal asks if he can write to her. She had decided at this point that she would never have a husband, despite the constant efforts of her landlady, and her dream is to save money from her job of making beautiful corsets and camisoles and start a ladies' dress shop. Then George, the canal worker, arrives in her life, and everything changes. The second act tells a familiar tale -- how our lives and dreams don't work out as we expect them to, and threading beneath it is Esther's quiet affection for the Jewish man from whom she buys her fabrics. I'll let you see how it turns out. In Fabulation, Undine (not her real name) is living the high life in Manhattan as head of her own p.r. firm, arranging fundraising events that feature any celebrities she can get her hands on. Then, on one awful day, her carefully built world comes crashing down, and suddenly she is Sharona again, moving back in with her mother, father, brother and grandmother in the projects, trying to reconstruct a life that is blown apart. While Fabulation is nowhere near as poignant as Intimate Apparel, it has its own frantic charms and even slows its pace slightly in the final scenes as Undine tries to grapple with her new poverty, a man who is interested in her and her family's willingness to accept her even though she turned her back on them. Literate, deft in dialogue, meaningful -- what more could you want in a play?

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-29 00:00:00 Matthew Fox Five solid stars for Intimate Apparel which I loved so much that Fabulation paled in comparison. Lynn Nottage always goes hard on the wistfulness and it is my favourite thing. Intimate Apparel is a perfect collision of my interests: letter writing, boarding houses, immigration, the Lower East Side, and forbidden physical contact.