The central defining element of Intimate Apparel is rather unusual and surprising for a work of drama. It is imagery, which is to be expected, but it is neither a moving image nor dialogue. Both Act One and Act Two drawn to a close with the on-stage recreation of old-fashioned sepia-toned photograph from the turn of the 20th century. These living photographs become the memorialized imprint of a single moment in time captured forever that is usually looked at without context a century later.
Act One ends with a flash-bulb illuminating a moment on their wedding day. Projected over their unmoving figures is a title card reading “Unidentified Negro Couple, ca 1905.” A blackout immediately follows. Act Two commences and leads inexorably toward another moment frozen in time, this time featuring just Esther alone as the title projected over the sepia-toned lighting which frames her reads “Unidentified Negro Seamstress, ca, 1905.” And then another blackout brings the performance officially to a close.
While the effect is certainly diminished in the mere telling, by the time these effects show up on stage, the point is clear and the irony deep. Intimate Apparel seeks to become in microcosm a secret history of America. Millions of photographs depicting a subject known forever after only as “Unidentified Negro” have been put on display in museums and books for over a century. Each of those grainy sepia-toned snapshots capture a single moment in time of a life that was lived to the fullest ability possibly. Maybe the subject died mere days after the shutter of the camera was snapped or maybe the figure in the photo went on to pose for thousands of pictures taken by family members and friends over the course of a life extending for decades.
Regardless of the how long the life was lived or how well, every single “Unidentified Negro” was a human being whose time spent on earth had already covered much territory before the photo was taken and would cover territory afterward. They had brothers and sisters and parents and friends and co-workers and enemies and one-night stands and unlikely encounters with the famous and infamous and each on some level had a story to tell.
Perhaps that story by itself, in all its mundane reality, was not the stuff of the Broadway stage and critical accolades and awards ceremonies, but infused with a little fictional dramatic gas, many of those “Unidentified Negro” people who lived and laughed loved and died might well have been transformed into a character as worth of a story existing beyond that single image frozen in time.
