Intimate Apparel is not the first play by Lynn Nottage to be seen at Steppenwolf. Crumbs from the Table of Joy was produced as part of the 1995-1996 Arts Exchange Season. Gabrielle Kaplan of the Chicago Reader described Crumbs as a “bittersweet memory play…structurally akin to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.” The play chronicles the story of an unconventional black family–a recently widowed father and his two daughters living in a tenement in New York during the 1950s. Their journey from Florida to New York exposes arduous aspects of religion, communism and interracial love within the family.
The main character, Ernestine Crump, a teenage girl struggling with uprooting her life during the most awkward time in adolescence, escapes through 1950s cinema, idolizing the white female actors. One of the most striking characters is Ernestine’s Aunt Lily, a smoking, outspoken freethinker. Aunt Lily also dabbles in communism and flirts with Ernestine’s father to no avail. Kaplan praised Nottage’s characterization, writing that “Aunt Lily defies 1950s stereotypes of black women with a truth I’ve never seen before in a contemporary play.” Crumbs was well received by adult and student audiences alike, leading Delia O’Hara of the Chicago Sun-Times to conclude that “It was clear that the play had made the students think…there were lots of probing, thoughtful questions.” With its fully realized characters in a historical New York, the Arts Exchange production of Crumbs provided Steppenwolf audiences with a rare and unexpected preview to Intimate Apparel.