‘INTIMATE APPAREL’ A FITTING DEBUT
STAGE AND SCREEN ACTOR JASMINE BRACEY IS DIRECTING HER FIRST SHOW AT NORTH COAST REP
Jasmine Bracey is beginning her new year with a new challenge. Already a veteran actor on stage, in films and on television, she is directing a theatrical production for the first time: Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.
For Bracey, who is the academic department director for acting foundations and technique at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) in New York City, “Intimate Apparel” is ideal for her directorial debut.
“This play is absolutely stunning,” she said. “It’s a story that leaves you with such mixed feelings. I don’t think you can watch it without wanting to talk about it. I could not be happier to be working on Lynn Nottage as my very first piece.”
First produced in 2003 and premiering off-Broadway a year later, “Intimate Apparel” tells the story of Esther, a Black seamstress around the beginning of the 20th century, who runs a successful business out of a New York boarding house. But she dreams of romance, and a correspondence with a man in the Caribbean raises her hopes, especially when he
makes the journey to meet her.
“A lot of my childhood memories are around my mother’s sewing machine, hanging out while she made me clothes,” Bracey said. “This idea of somebody in 1905 being able to have a lucrative profession is what’s so interesting about Esther: she is self-employed, she has her own business, but the only thing missing is love.”
In the North Coast Rep production, Esther is being played by Nedra Snipes.
“Nedra is remarkable,” said
Bracey. “She has a great sense of who Esther is. I have allowed Nedra to bring herself to this character. Esther is often portrayed as meek. Esther can have meekness within her, but she’s actually quite strong and formidable.”
The North Coast Rep cast also includes Madeleine Barker, Jonathan Fisher Jr., Arizsia Staton, Teri Brown and Donald Paul as George Armstrong, Esther’s love-letters correspondent.
Brown is playing the part of
Mrs. Dickson, who owns the boarding house where Esther lives and works. That’s a role Bracey knows firsthand. She portrayed Mrs. Dickson in a 2001 production of the play at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2021.
Now directing the play, Bracey has her own vision for “Intimate Apparel.”
“One of the things our production (in Utah) did and that I see done often is that it becomes this kind of period museum piece that might
allow the audience to disconnect from it,” she said. “I’m looking to see how people can see not just its beauty and time but feel it now, because it does have some relevant themes to who and how we are today.”
One of them, she said, is “the desire and need for connection. With the pandemic, a lot of us were in isolation or had to reckon with emotions from being alone.”
Having assistant-directed many times, Bracey had planned on being at the helm of a production as far back as five years ago, but the pandemic waylaid those plans. Even now she describes herself an “actor-slash-director for sure. I’ve always known that directing and acting are both in my wheelhouse.”
So it follows that Bracey’s next project after “Intimate Apparel” will be at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, where she’ll perform in a production of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”