By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO— Intimate Apparel, which opened Friday night at the San Diego Rep, is an engrossing, multi-layered play by Lynn Nottage that explores the relationships and dreams of Esther, a seamstress , who is played powerfully and movingly by  Lisa Renee Pitts.  

Other reviewers perhaps will write about the main plot concerning George (Michael A. Shepperd),  the man who romanced her by mail, or perhaps will dwell on how equally lonely Esther and her client, Mrs. Van Pelt (Lisel Gorell-Getz) are, notwithstanding their differences of race and social status.

But I should like to concentrate on the idealized relationship that Lisa has with Mr. Marks (Lance Arthur Smith), the Hasidic man who sells her fabrics and treats her with the dignity and the grace that also characterizes her approach to everyone client she meets, be they society ladies or prostitutes.

This is an emotional play for Jews to watch because although it is set in 1905, it evokes for current day audiences the shining moments of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s when two good people who built a friendship based on shared values and mutual respect—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel— symbolically walked together across the Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. 

Later, of course, tensions, mutual recriminations, and anger often pulled Black and Jew apart, especially in places like Crown Heights where Hasidim and Blacks bumped against each other in explosive conflagrations. Yet here is a play by Nottage, an African-American woman, that revives the feelings of  respect and affection that the two groups had for each other.  And she dramatizes it subtly, by allowing the deep bond between Esther and Mr. Marks to develop based upon their common interests and their profound dignity.

Esther is a seamstress; Marks' brother and father were tailors, and he gladly would have practiced the same profession—had he not been born with big, clumsy hands that he likened to the sausages of his native Romania.  

Marks gives Esther a "favorite customer" discount on a piece of Japanese silk that in the form of a man's smoking jacket  will prove to be a far more intimate piece of apparel then the lingerie she sews for ladies.  Esther moves close to Marks to thank him,  but, startled, he backs away.  Misunderstanding the cause, she says that her color will not rub off on him.  He assures her that race is not at all the issue.  As a religious Jew, he explains, he is not permitted to touch a woman who is not his wife or a member of his immediate family.  There is a woman in Romania to whom he is betrothed, a woman he never has met.

With Marks unavailable, the illiterate Esther allows herself to fall in love with the man who sends letters to her—and to whom she sends return correspondence either  via Mrs. Van Buren or the prostitute
Mayme (Lisa H. Payton).  

At a third meeting with Marks—which came after a long interval—he confesses that he was scared that he had lost Esther to a business competitor or that something bad had happened to her.  He serves her tea, thereby actualizing her own dream of someday owning a beauty parlor in which Black women would be treated like ladies, and served a cup of tea.

When she at last tells this gentle man that she is to be married, he tries unsuccessfully to mask his disappointment.  Gallantly, he makes a present to her of the beautiful wedding dress fabric he thought she had wanted for a customer. She runs out of his apartment shop, and he follows her, insisting that she take it.  Through the fabric, their hands briefly rest upon each other's.

All this occurs in Act One, but the morality, the reserve, the consideration, and, above all, the respectfulness that these two people from different backgrounds show each other will, in Act Two,  remain the one constant in Esther's increasingly turbulent world.

It is a matter of coincidence that the San Diego Rep opened this play on the heels of strongly worded protests by the Anti-Defamation League and other members of the San Diego Jewish community against an article by Edwin Decker that had appeared only a few days ago in the alternative newspaper, San Diego CityBEAT.  Decker, in strong sexual language, had denounced the Orthodox practice that discourages unmarried men and women from having physical contact, describing the custom as extremely disrespectful of women.  Yet, on stage, the Hasid is portrayed in exactly opposite fashion: he is, indeed, most respectful of Esther.  I hope Decker will take in the play.

In fact, I'd recommend it to everyone.  It is well written, well directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, and well acted, most especially by Pitts, whose "Esther" would make any Mordechai stand up and cheer. The San Diego Rep play will run through April 9 in the Lyceum Theatre in front of  the Horton Plaza Shopping Center.