Lynn Nottage and Intimate Apparel:

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Lynn Nottage began researching turn of the century Manhattan after cleaning out her grandmother’s brownstone where she found an old passport photo. In this picture was Nottage’s great grandmother and her two young daughters. All Nottage knew of her relative was that she had been a seamstress and so Nottage began “searching for this woman who was part of the fabric of my life, but who was very much a mystery to me” (Nottage). From this research into the music, streets, and people of 1900s New York Nottage wrote Intimate Apparel.

 

It is impossible not to notice the almost overwhelming presence of beds throughout the play, one in every scene to be exact. “I wanted to see the way in which [beds] impact interactions,” says Nottage “Even if the bed isn’t used, even if no one sits on it, how does that change the sexual dynamic, the social intercourse?” (Nottage). These interactions range from physical with a lack of emotion to chaste with intimate affection. The feelings of love, loneliness, sadness, and loss of self that are felt within the script come from Nottage’s desire to write “something simple and gentle” and as a result of writing the play right after her mother’s death. 

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Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter.  Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. She is currently working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera (commissioned by The Met/LCT).  She is also developing This is Reading, a performance installation based on two years of interviews set to open at the Franklin Street, Reading Railroad Station in Reading, PA.  She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory (lynnnottage.com).

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Below is an interview with Lynn Nottage from 2004 in which she discusses her plays as well as being an African American woman playwright. 

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