Palm Beach Dramaworks to Open Lynn Nottage's INTIMATE APPAREL This Friday

Lynn Nottage's heartfelt and heartbreaking Intimate Apparel, which she wrote "to honor the legacy of her great-grandmother," opens at Palm Beach Dramaworks on Friday, April 1 (8pm). Set at the turn of the 20th century, the play tells the story of Esther, a 35-year-old African-American seamstress of exquisite intimate apparel who aches to love and be loved. An unlikely opportunity arises when she enters into a correspondence with a man she's never met. The play runs through April 17, with specially priced previews on March 30 and 31.

The production is directed by Be Boyd, making her PBD debut, and features (in alphabetical order) Rita Cole, Jovon Jacobs, Gabrielle Lee, Krystal Mosley, Jordan Sobel, and Gracie Winchester. All but Jacobs are making their PBD mainstage debuts. Scenic design is by Michael Amico, costume design is by Brian O'Keefe, lighting design is by Kirk Bookman, and sound design is by Roger Arnold.

The journey to writing Intimate Apparel began when Nottage discovered a photo of her great-grandmother while cleaning out the house of her grandmother, who was struggling with dementia and moving in with Lynn's brother. She told an interviewer, "I'd never seen this woman before. I didn't even know her name." She later discovered that her great-grandmother's name was Ethel Boyce Armstrong. Nottage's mother had already passed away, so there was no one left who could provide her with family history. All Nottage knew initially was that her great-grandmother had been a seamstress at the turn of the 20th century. So, she spent hours at the New York Public Library, learning about the world in which Ethel lived.

"I wrote Intimate Apparel in part because of my desire to get closer to my ancestors," Nottage told PBD Producing Artistic Director William Hayes in a 2020 interview (available on YouTube). "I wanted to understand what it might have been like for a single, Black woman at the turn of the century to try and forge a life in New York City despite all the obstacles she probably had to face. I also wanted to write a play for my mother, something that she would have loved to have seen, something that was in her gentle, loving spirit."

Lynn Nottage is the only woman to have twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She won in 2009 for Ruined and 2017 for Sweat. Other full-length plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Por'Knockers; Mud, River, Stone; Las Meninas; Intimate Apparel; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Mlima's Tale; and Clyde's. She wrote the book for the musical The Secret Life of Bees (music by Duncan Sheik, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead), and MJ: The Musical, featuring the songs of Michael Jackson. She is also the librettist for the opera Intimate Apparel (score by Ricky Ian Gordon), which premiered at Lincoln Center in January for a limited run and was recorded for future broadcast by Great Performances on PBS. Nottage was also a writer and producer on the Netflix series She's Gotta Have It, directed by Spike Lee. Her work has been widely produced in the United States and throughout the world, and she is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship as well as many other distinguished awards. A native of Brooklyn, Nottage is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, and is an associate professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts.

For more information visit: www.palmbeachdramaworks.org

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