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For Esther, the 35-year-old African American seamstress in Lynn Nottage’s award-winning play, the key to the golden door into a new world of hope and prosperity is literally in her hands. “It was as though God kissed my hands when I first pulled the fabric through the sewing machine and held up a finished garment,” she says of her gift for creating beautiful corsets.

Her sensuous undergarments are worn by both the wealthy socialites of Park Avenue and the prostitutes working the streets of the Tenderloin. Having created wedding corsets for twenty-two women living in her boardinghouse, she longs for companionship and a husband of her own. She weds George, whom she knows only through romantic correspondences they shared when he was working on the Panama Canal. When she realizes that he may not be the same person who wrote those passionate thoughts, Esther must answer difficult questions about her own identity, motives, traditions and feelings about a woman’s place in the world.

Historically, women were primarily defined by their relationships to men, with marriage as the way in which women could best hope to improve their social and financial stations. But by 1905, women worldwide were challenging notions of womanhood and seeking the power to define themselves and their world outside of marriage. They wanted the opportunity to choose their leaders, have a voice in their nations and the power to shape their own lives. The increasing appearance of women in public places — schools, factories and other places of commerce — eroded older, idolized images of the Victorian woman as dependent, submissive and aloof. For African American women, the struggle for social justice was doubly difficult because gender solidarity could not flourish under the iron hand of racial prejudice.

The turn of the 20th century also saw the United States transition from a largely agrarian society to a burgeoning industrialized one. The massive influx of immigrants from all over the world and the great migration north of African Americans to emerging urban metropolises intensified tensions among different classes, races and ethnic groups.

Out of this chaotic time in America’s history, Nottage has crafted a simple, yet rigorous and poetic look at one community’s struggle to break free from its circumstances and society’s limited expectations on its way toward hope, respect and acceptance.

Nottage’s own great-grandmother’s story provided the inspiration for Intimate Apparel. She was a seamstress who arrived alone in New York City in 1902 and began corresponding with a man who was working on the Panama Canal. Brooklyn native Nottage recalls “cleaning out my grandmother’s brownstone, which she had lived in for more than 50 years, and going through all of these things. I picked up an old issue of Family Circle magazine from the 1960s, and this picture fell out. It was a picture of my great-grandmother, whom I never knew, with my grandmother and her sister, and I thought ‘My god, this is the first time I’ve ever seen her.’ It was shocking — I was a grown woman being introduced to my ancestor for the very first time. It was a wonderful experience that also made me very sad, because I thought ‘I don’t know who she is…I know nothing about her.’ That’s what sent me on this journey, to discover who I am by rediscovering my personal history.”

During the same interview for the world premiere in Baltimore she adds, “I came to this play at a moment in my life after my mother had died and when my grandmother was senile, and I realized that there was a part of my personal history that would be completely lost if I didn’t write it down. So for me, this was a very personal journey. At the same time, I thought it was a wonderful theme to explore — a woman turning thirty-five, reflecting on her life and resigned to the fact that she’s never going to find love.”

Like the corsets that Esther makes, the characters in Nottage’s play suffer their own personal confinement at the hands of a constricting society. Women, like Mrs. Dickson and Mrs. Van Buren, whose identity and self-worth are defined by their husbands, soon find that their emotional and spiritual needs are not being met because of the unreciprocal nature of their marriages. They share a common struggle, but remain divided by the social and racial gulf between them. For others like Mayme, the Oberlin College-educated, African American pianist and prostitute, racism keeps her from reaching her full potential. For Mr. Marks, the Jewish fabric shop owner, the confinement of the structures of his religion close him off from the woman who could be his true soul mate. And for George, the Barbadian laborer, trying to be a “man” in a modern society proves frustrating when his livelihood is challenged because of the color of his skin.

Nottage is no stranger to Louisville audiences. Her short play, Poof! premiered at Actors Theatre in 1993 where it won the Heideman Award for the National Ten-Minute Play Contest. She was a contributor on the multi-writer project, Snapshot produced during the 2002 Humana Festival. These plays and many of her longer pieces continue her poignant examination of race, gender, privilege and power that also weaves a streak of desire and regret. When director Tim Bond encountered the play for the first time, he immediately felt a “sense of pride and dignity…a deep feeling for issues that women were dealing with then and continue to deal with in our society, a deep sense of romance and love which is missing in our society and is so integral to each of our lives on a daily basis and a need to have connection to somebody who can see the worth in ourselves.” Having just completed a production of the play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Bond’s firsthand experience has only deepened his appreciation and joy for the piece. “There is such a grace, compassion and poignancy in the work,” he said.

Nottage reminds us that because of the insurmountable barriers of the period “even the most unadorned of emotions were impossible to express freely. The language of emotions that has evolved from a hundred years of a culture of psychology did not exist [for these characters], so they communicated through subtle gestures.”

One can feel the restlessness of the new century coursing through the characters, yearning to be free and inching toward an uncertain future. One hundred years later as the world gets smaller and more interdependent, Nottage has shown us not only how far we’ve journeyed as a country, but also how much further we have to travel; along the way Nottage has crafted an exquisite piece as rich and delicate as the lingerie Esther makes.