The intimate Everyman Theatre is just about the perfect place for a re-staging of playwright Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. First produced in Baltimore in 2003, the play is full of small moments that say bigger things and moments of closeness that would be easily lost in a larger space.

Running through November 19, the production is one of Nottage’s best-known works. Most of Nottage’s work, including Intimate Apparel and her two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, Sweat and Ruined, centers on the lives of black women. The MacArthur Genius’ prize for Sweat this year made her the first woman to win the Drama prize twice.

And from Intimate Apparel’s return to its birthplace, it’s not hard to see why critics have been such fans of her work. 

The show is paced like the train whose clanging punctuated the silence of the small set on several occasions. It slows almost to a stop and lingers on some scenes, and it barrels through others almost too quickly. Driving the action is Esther, a black seamstress of ladies’ underthings in turn-of-the-century New York, expertly brought to life by Dawn Ursula. The earnestness and sincerity of her expressions is often more telling than than her words, but that’s not to say her delivery of Nottage’s lines is lacking. The opposite is true. Ardently hopeful and crushingly realistic, Esther is a lonely soul with wonderful dreams but feet set firmly on the ground. For all her practicality, she longs for lovely things—a fine fabric, beautiful words, a loving touch.

The characters around her are few but rich. Beth Hylton’s Mrs. Van Buren has a sing-songy drawl and a wonderful, wicked laugh that brings to mind Blanche Devereaux. The striking voices of George (Bueka Uwemedimo) and Mayme (Jade Wheeler) are luckily given their due attention by Nottage’s script. One long and booming, the other short and lilting, the two make an interesting pair in more ways than one. 

Rounding out the cast are a delightful gossipy mother hen in Mrs. Dickson (Jenn Walker) and Jewish fabric merchant Mr. Marks, played by Drew Kopas. Kopas makes the most out of the least in his role. And the scenes in his small shop are some of the very best in the show. There’s so much between Esther and Mr. Marks that cannot be said, so one-sided looks and heart-wrenching silences fill in for dialogue. Kopas’ Mr. Marks says all the audience needs to understand through careful movements and familiar expressions. Like the fine embroidered silks over which he and Esther bond, it’s masterful work.

Words come second to moments in Intimate Apparel. What can’t be spoken aloud is said loudly enough through light touches, the care with which a garment is eased over shoulders, and beautiful fabrics tossed carelessly away.

Esther’s story is one of fear of loneliness, hope for the future and an acceptance of one’s reality that are so often at odds with one another. And like reality, there are no easy answers. Loose ends aren’t easily tied off and snipped clean. Instead we are left to want and to wonder, just as Esther does, going faithfully forward about our work.

The care and success with which Intimate Apparel has been brought to the Everyman stage bodes well for a season of small casts with big stories. Audiences will see Ursula and Hylton together again in next month’s The Revolutionists. After the joy they brought to most of their scenes together over the past weeks, the possibilities for what the two will be able to do with a whole comedy are endless.

This weekend, Everyman Theatre opens its second production of the season, Intimate Apparel, which has themes of class, culture, and circumstance. It centers on an African-American seamstress in turn of the century New York, who makes intimate garments for a variety of clients, and shares lingering affections with a Jewish fabric maker. Intimate Apparel’s playwright Lynn Nottage is the first woman to win two Pulitzer Prizes for her work, and this is the third of her plays that Everyman has produced. Everyman Resident Company member Dawn Ursula, who plays the lead Esther, joined us to talk about preparing for the role, the power of live theater, and getting star struck.

This is your third leading role in a Lynn Nottage play at Everyman. Nottage is one of the most acclaimed playwrights around right now, as she won the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year. Are you starting to feel like you know her characters and her style?

That’s a good question. I think with some playwrights and their work, you might be able to say that. But I think what’s so brilliant about Lynn Nottage is how varied her plays are. [Last year’s prize] was the second Pulitzer that she’s won, she won for Ruined previously, and when I think about Ruined [about the plight of women in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo] versus Intimate Apparel, you could convince me, if I didn’t know better, that different playwrights wrote those plays. She can really craft something so uniquely that you can’t quite peg the way she’s going to channel the story. Although I could find and draw similarities between the characters and their struggles, they are such wonderfully different people. It’s a real joy to be able to start fresh and really begin, asking, “Ok, who is this person? How do they walk in the world?”

Even if they are so different, they seem like such complex characters.

And that’s a gift from the playwright to us as the actors that these characters are so wonderfully human. And when a playwright crafts something like that, you’re able to give it full body, and that’s what makes that much more of an impact on the audience. Human beings are such complex creatures, we can have such empathy and be so brilliant and yet so brutal. She knows how to draw that out.

Do you ever get star struck when you’re performing Nottage’s works because of who she is and the quality of what you’re preforming?

Yes, I can admit to that happening. I think it probably manifests itself in some good, positive nervousness. It’s like, ok, we’re doing a Lynn Nottage play, and we really can’t mess this up, ya’ll, because it’s her. (laughs) There’s a little bit of good intimidation and fear that we’re able to recognize and put into the work, and that drives us all that much more. It’s the same with an August Wilson piece—it’s of that caliber. We recognize how precious it is.

Intimate Apparel has a history in Baltimore. It had its premier at Center Stage in 2003, and Esther seems like a character who could have easily existed here. What’s your process been like researching and preparing to play her?

Luckily for us, we have a director, Tazewell Thompson, who has directed it before, and even the way he conducts rehearsals, he sets up what the world was like for us in Manhattan in 1905. The character of Esther is based off of some facts and information about a relative of Nottage’s, and she puts pretty much all the information you need in the text—which also shows how amazing a playwright she is, because the character is clear because of the circumstances she is going through, what she says, what people say about her.

How do Lynn Nottage characters compare with others you’ve played in terms of how deeply you feel them?

I grow immensely and so quickly affectionate towards the characters that I play, and it’s easy with Lynn Nottage pieces. Even Mama Nadi, the madam in Ruined. I might have my issues with her, but I loved me some Mama Nadi. I will know when Intimate Apparel is done based on how long it takes Esther to leave me alone. Sometimes, when a show is closed and I’m ready to move on, a character will leave me quickly. But others might still be rattling around. With Mama Nadi, I had to ask her to go. I had to be like, “I love you, I’m so glad we got to tell your story, but you need to leave now.”

What’s it like to bring this play at this time in history? And what has really resonated about the story with you?

Hopefully one day this play is done and it’s just done for the beautiful story that it is and it doesn’t feel so timely. But it’s such an immigrant story— it’s about this new country where people want to come and work hard and make a life and be prosperous and fruitful and good and the hardships that they encounter. And then the discrimination and the classicism that occurs and the socio-economic barriers that come up. There are also challenges that these women are experiencing. I fully expect there to be lots of moments in the play when the women in the audience, and hopefully the men too, cringe at the fact that though it’s set in 1905, that incredibly sexist thing that’s happening on stage could happen in 2017. Hopefully, that gives us all pause.

In some ways, I’m sure that’s frustrating, but in other ways, that also serves as a connection point between you and the audience.

I do think about it that way. So much about what the gift of theater is for us to acknowledge and see ourselves where we are and where we want to go. We watch these real people on stage living these lives and it is for us as an audience to take a moment to reflect, to be empathetic, to make a discovery. That’s like a good bowl of chicken soup when you’re sick, and that’s one of the wonderful things that a play like this does.