RALEIGH - If you feel a familiar queasiness seeing Lynn Nottage's characters compromise their life dreams in "Intimate Apparel," you need only look outside the doors of Raleigh Little Theatre to know why.

Mortgage foreclosures, unemployment, bigotry, financial scams -- the hardships of Nottage's 1905 Manhattan are in full force a century later.

That's the strength of this 2004 off-Broadway drama, but also its weakness. It takes little time with Nottage's cast of compromised characters to realize that this isn't a play about people who beat the odds. It's about having to let go of your ideals, and even that not being enough.

And once you know that, the path to the sober conclusion grows increasingly unpleasant and dull.

Still, "Intimate Apparel" is a refreshing choice for the 71-year-old company, especially on the heels of the risque Broadway hits "The Full Monty" and "Urinetown" -- all departures from typical community theater fare. And Nottage's play does more than dramatize our continual economic hardships, it also addresses racial and ethnic tensions and -- as its title implies -- sexuality.

The play centers on a 35-year-old single African-American seamstress named Esther (Barbette Hunter), who lives in a rooming house and makes fancy corsets for high-class ladies and prostitutes alike. Esther, lonely and illiterate, dreams of opening a beauty parlor with her life savings, and of finding an ideal mate.

A letter arrives from a male stranger from Barbados (Joseph Callender) who is working on the Panama Canal. Esther's pragmatic landlady, Mrs. Dickson (LeDawna Akins), scoffs at the impropriety of such a correspondence and orders Esther to ignore it. But a wealthy customer, Mrs. Van Buren (Staci Sabarsky), urges the seamstress to reply and offers to compose the responses -- as much for her own titillation as for Esther. A prostitute friend, Mayme (Sharon Tazewell), also agrees to help, adding spice to the correspondence.

Meanwhile, Esther is growing increasingly fond of her fabric salesman, a sweet-natured Romanian Jew named Mr. Marks (Leon Sabarsky), whose family has arranged for him to marry a Romanian woman he does not yet know.

Nottage's focus on intimate letters and undergarments serves the play well, providing ample opportunity for characters to reveal emotions they might otherwise keep secret. And her characters' shared yearning for love and respect, along with their markedly different ways of addressing those desires, creates an interesting perspective on human behavior.

Directed by Linda O'Day Young, the tale is engaging at first, with scenes that are often funny but pierced -- sometimes too suddenly -- with intense or poignant revelations. The cast, with varying abilities, fares best with the intimate moments that are Nottage's forte.

But by Act II, the drama becomes predictable, even as Nottage resorts to coincidence for a major plot turn and her characters start behaving in contradictory ways. Hunter's endearing performance and the affecting moments from other actors make up for some of the script's failings. But Nottage should have taken a cue from old-time corset designers and left more to the imagination.