by Barry Willis *

Playwright Lynn Nottage is a national treasure. Her plays such as Sweat, Clyde’s, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and The Secret Life of Bees are always popular, always entertaining, and always thought-provoking. They tend to run in unexpected directions, which only partly explains their enormous appeal.

Petaluma’s Mercury Theater is presenting a beautiful production of her poignant Intimate Apparel through September 13.

In it, a sensitive talented seamstress is undone by her own innocence.

It’s New York City, 1905, where we meet Esther (Noell Webber), a single black 35-year-old living in a rooming house, where for the past seventeen years she has supported herself by designing and making elaborate frilly undergarments for women from both ends of the economic spectrum—socialites and sex workers alike. Esther is bright, methodical, and inventive but hampered by her inability to read and write.

For reasons never made clear in the play she becomes involved in a courtship-by-mail with a laborer named George Armstrong (Isiah Carter), up to his neck in mud digging the Panama Canal. To understand his letters and to respond, she enlists the aid of rooming house proprietor Mrs. Dixon (Layce Lynne Kieu), followed by help from Mrs. Van Buren (Maddi Scarbrough), a socialite client who considers it naughty fun to intervene in a working-class affair. (Tertiary plot: libertine Mrs. Van Buren has an appetite for naughty fun, and doesn’t enjoy having it spoiled.)

Esther regularly buys fabric from Mr. Marks (John Browning), a charming, congenial conservative Jew with pronounced old country mannerisms and accent—and an arranged and unfulfilled marriage with a Romanian woman he’s never met.

The magnetic attraction between seamstress and fabric merchant is palpable, made all the more heartrending because both parties recognize its impossibility.

On an austere but very effective set by Laurynn Malilay, director Leontyne Mbele-Mbong has coaxed a tremendous performance from her cast of six, including Mercedes Murphy as Esther’s untrustworthy friend Mayme. Webber and Browning are especially convincing, conveying their characters’ inner turmoil and social inhibitions with fantastic subtlety.

Lighting designer Missy Weaver heightens every emotional nuance—there are many—with just the right balance of light and shadow. Costumes by Alia Davis and Nadine Bradley range from simple to ornate, all alluding perfectly to the previous turn-of-the-century.

Esther’s innocence and willingness to trust are the theme that propels this powerful drama, its coda her resilience in the face of misfortune. Carter’s George is a persuasive Caribbean scammer who wins her misplaced trust. As with the works of August Wilson, another great chronicler of the black experience, Nottage’s characters often function in an environment of racial and social oppression, but decisions, actions, and consequences are all their own.

Intimate Apparel is a tremendous bit of plausible fiction about life 120 years ago. It will make viewers appreciate how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go.

Playing through September 13, 2026 at Mercury Theater, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N, Petaluma.

Click HERE for more information and tickets.

Photos by Mike Thompson

Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and past president of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: barry.m.willis@gmail.com