Andy
Webster

October 16, 2015

A “Rashomon” about sexual harassment, Oren Safdie’s thought-provoking “Unseamly,” now at Urban Stages, is about the elusive, selective nature of memory in the age of Dov Charney, the ousted chief executive of American Apparel, and the fashion photographer Terry Richardson. Before the show begins, we see a young woman onstage in a smart blue mini-dress and black boots, spinning idly in an office armchair while a wall video montage (by Nicholas Blade Guldner) presents a flurry of glossy glamorous images: cars, cityscapes, a dapper gentleman. The woman, Malina (Gizel Jimenez), is meeting a lawyer, Adam (Tommy Schrider), in hopes of pursuing a lawsuit against her former employer, Ira Slatsky (Jonathan Silver). Hired at 17, she worked for Ira, a clothing manufacturer, for over two years. Hoping she might appear in his famously salacious billboards, she entered a relationship fraught with blunt chauvinism and blithely brazen demands. Or so she says. The fastidious Adam is initially skeptical about taking on her case.