Arizona Theatre Company opens 2024 with 'Intimate Apparel' in Tucson

At its core, Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” is a play recounting the African-American experience in turn-of-last century America.

But Oz Scott, who is directing Arizona Theater Company's production that opens in Tucson on Saturday, Jan. 20, says the story is much more universal.

“It is not just a play about Black people, it’s a play that anybody will really come to see themselves in. … It speaks to everybody,” said Scott, who is making his ATC debut after decades of directing for stage, film and television.

Scott said “Intimate Apparel” reminds him of when he directed Nitozake Shange’s “For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” in 1976. During the Off-Broadway run, he said, “I remember going to a class at NYU that was full of Jewish and Italian women, older women, and they all said, ‘That’s my story.’”

“When you see ‘Intimate Apparel,’ I think everybody will say, ‘I know that’s my story, that’s my grandmother’s story,’” he said. “Lynn Nottage has written a wonderful play that emotionally anybody can get into. Anybody can feel. I think that’s what’s wonderful about this story.”

“Intimate Apparel,” which the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nottage wrote in 2003, is the story of Esther, a seamstress who sews intimate apparel for rich white women and Black prostitutes alike.

She lives in a New York boarding house and saves every penny so she can one day open a beauty salon where Black women will be pampered like the white socialites for whom she works.

And while Esther is smitten over the Hasidic shopkeeper who sells her fabric, both realize their relationship would never pass society’s muster in early 1900s New York City.

With the help of a fellow resident in the boarding house, the illiterate Esther strikes up a pen-pal relationship with George Armstrong, a lonesome Caribbean man working on the Panama Canal. He writes her romantic letters describing an ideal happily-ever-after life and when he pops the marriage question, Esther agrees.

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But the real George and the George from those letters prove to be two different people when he moves to New York. He absconds with Esther’s nest egg not long after the I Dos.

Undeterred, Esther returns to her sewing machine and starts all over.

Scott’s vision of Esther is that of a woman under the thumb of all those around her. She’s a victim who doesn’t know how to play the role of victim; she’s more comfortable just letting life happen around her without speaking out.

“She finds that she’s got to push out, but it’s very scary for people to push out because they never have,” Scott said during a day off from rehearsing last week. “Do I stay with the status quo or do I move on? And the status quo was very safe.”

That idea of stepping outside of your comfort zone resonates with what’s happening in the world today, Scott said, recalling a visit to Russia in the years after the fall of communism. A Russian official told Scott that if the people of Russia back then had a choice, they would return to communism because it was what they knew, what they were comfortable with.

Americans today also are stuck in the status quo, especially on issues such as immigration and the economy, said Scott, whose credits over the past 25-plus years have included dozens of TV series (“Chicago P.D.,” “Black-ish,” “Criminal Minds,” “The Jeffersons”) and several films (“Crash Course” in 1988 and 2003’s “The Cheetah Girls”).

“Intimate Apparel” opens in previews Saturday, Jan. 20-Thursday, Jan. 25, and continues through Feb. 10 at the Temple of Music and Art.

Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Twitter @Starburch