The year is 1905. The place, New York City. Esther Mills left North Carolina seeking better opportunities when she was in her teens. She’s now 35 and living in a women’s boarding house, where she sews “intimate apparel” for a clientele that ranges from wealthy white women to black prostitutes. Esther has done well; she keeps her savings sewn into a quilt and dreams of opening a beauty parlor where black women will be treated with the courtesy given to the white women for whom she sews.

What she doesn’t have is a man. Other residents of the boarding house meet “decent colored men” and get married. Esther remains single and seems doomed to a life of loneliness until she gets a letter from George Armstrong, a man who knows a man from her church down home. George writes that he’s helping build the Panama Canal — may he write to her? Esther can’t read or write but one of her clients helps her send a letter in reply. Several letters later, George asks her to marry him.

Welcome to “Intimate Apparel,” written by African-­American playwright Lynn Nottage and presented here as the inaugural production of director Troy M. Apostol’s Evolve Theatre Company LLC. This is Apostol’s second time directing a Nottage play; his first was the excellent production of “Ruined,” Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story of wartime rape survivors in the Congo, staged at the University of Hawaii-­Manoa in 2014. Anyone who saw Apostol’s “Ruined” will find “Intimate Apparel” lives up to expectations.

Each character is vividly written. All of them — rich and poor, black and white — are lonely people.

Esther’s landlady, Mrs. Dickson (Shervelle Bergholz), is a widow who married for economic advancement. Esther’s friend, Mayme (Allison Paynter), is a prostitute whose chances of finding a husband seem nonexistent. Mrs. Van Buren (Lurana Donnels O’Malley), one of Esther’s wealthy white clients, is in a loveless marriage to a man whose interests are elsewhere. Mr. Marks (T.C. Smith), the fabric merchant Esther buys materials from, is a Hasidic Jew who married in accordance with his parents’ wishes; his wife is back in Europe and he has never met her.

George Armstrong (Curtis Duncan), one generation removed from field labor, imagines New York as a place of unlimited opportunity for a black man who has worked on the Panama Canal — at least if he can get his hands on the money it takes to start a business. Duncan is a powerful presence as the designated villain.

Jeanne Wynne Herring gives a masterful performance as Esther. Diffident, shyly romantic, depressed, fearful or fierce — Herring hits each emotion convincingly. At times her eyes convey all that need be said. Herring’s scenes with Smith — playing kindred souls separated as much by religion as by race — are especially well-played.

Herring and O’Malley share the scenes that show the social separation of blacks and whites. The ultimate zinger comes when Mrs. Van Buren tells Esther that she loves her. Esther points out that she’s always had to use the servants’ entrance!

There are two problems to anticipate. One is that the audience sits on three sides of the performance area and sooner or later a sightline will be blocked by an actor’s body. The other is that when an actor speaks with their back to audience it can be hard to understand what’s being said. The scenes in which Duncan speaks in a rapid-fire Caribbean patois are also challenging.