Teachers bond as they move past loss in Florida Studio Theatre’s ‘Maytag Virgin’
Actress Rachel Moulton admits to having had symptoms of a kind of theatrical post-traumatic stress disorder as she started rehearsals for Audrey Cefaly’s two-character play “Maytag Virgin” at Florida Studio Theatre.
Moulton was in the middle of technical rehearsals in 2020 for a different two-character play, “Paralyzed,” when the coronavirus forced FST to shut down. The theater announced that the play would be included in its winter Stage III series, but then that season also was canceled because of concerns the productions might overtax the staff as they were trying to recover from pandemic closures.
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“After all that, I just wanted to get to rehearsal last week. I just wanted to be back in the room,” Moulton said during a recent Zoom interview with her director Kate Alexander. The production marks their eighth collaboration at FST. Moulton stars opposite Blake Price, who was seen in the FST production of “Bright Star,” a musical that ended its run just before theaters across the country shut down in 2020.
“A two-hander is a heavy pack for actors to carry,” Moulton said. “I’ve been doing prep work for a while, all these hours, staying up late til 1 or 2 in the morning and I kept thinking, ‘we better get to rehearsals.’ And we did.”
Moulton plays Lizzy Nash, a recently widowed high school English teacher who is taking a break from the classroom when another teacher moves in next door in a fictional town in Alabama. Price plays Jack Key, who also lost his spouse and has moved from Biloxi, Mississippi for a new job. The play traces the relationship that builds with the possibility of more over the course of a year as they get to know one another and realize they have a lot in common.
The Boston-based arts magazine Artsfuse.org wrote that the play is written “in such a truthful way that their blossoming love can’t help but grip you. Sometimes, well-executed simplicity is the most satisfying thing of all.”
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Alexander, who also directed Price in “Bright Star,” said Cefaly’s work fits the tradition of Southern writers like Hemingway and Faulkner in the way she writes about “wounded, brilliant, broken selves, our yearning for transcendence and connection and grace.”
Unlike more traditional romantic comedies, where relationships seem pre-destined or inevitable, “This isn’t like that,” Alexander said. “They could just miss at any given moment. That is the challenge. The trains could just pass and we’re all walking that very fragile road, to be aware and alert. To miss out is to miss everything in life.”
Alexander said she is enjoying working with the actors on the play’s “fragility, the humor and walking that tightrope and all the tensions we have to bring into it.”
Price said the play addresses the “age-old question, is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
It also touches on the importance of finding connections with others, at whatever level.
Moulton said she is inspired by a quote on Twitter from novelist Anne LaMott, who didn’t marry until she was 65. “So never ever give up, no matter how things look or how long they take. Don’t quit before the miracle,” she posted.
“That just reverberates through my brain and heart as we’re in rehearsal,” Moulton said.
If nothing more, Price said Lizzy and Jack become great friends “trying to embrace each and every moment,” Price said. “What happens? We’ll find out, but that’s what’s beautiful about this story. These people have nothing but respect to give each other.”
Not at first, however.
“At the beginning, they’re more like Beatrice and Benedick,” the battling would-be lovers in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Moulton said.
The actors are drawing on their own backgrounds and family as they develop their roles. Price grew up in Michigan, but his father is from Georgia “and it was easy to fall into that Southern drawl, the jovial nature of Jack. He generally is a happy person who sees the best in people.”
Moulton was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lived in rural Georgia for many years, and her mother’s family is from Texas.
“There’s a certain way Southern women speak that is rapid fire and reminds me a lot in the way Lizzy talks through things,” she said.
Lizzy also is someone who never feels she’s enough, which resonates with Moulton in her own life.
Cefaly initially described Lizzy as “endearingly neurotic, strong-willed. Quick-witted.”
“I have a strong resistance to the word neurotic,” Moulton said, noting that Cefaly added a note to the script saying that Lizzy “is not a busybody, nor is she a shrew, nor is she a ‘Karen.’ She is awkward and anxious and always worried she will never be enough.”
Moulton compares Lizzy to a “cracked porcelain dish and if she settles, if she sits in a moment too long, she will shatter. She’s protecting herself. But she’s very funny. It’s not a heavy heavy sad dark play. It’s rich with a lot of humor.”
Both actors said they trust Alexander.
“Working with her again is a gift, whether it’s any kind of show, two people or an ensemble,” Moulton said. “You feel there’s someone up there who is wholly invested in you. There’s that shared commitment to you as actors and having the integrity of telling the story and bringing as much of yourself to it as she can.”
‘Maytag Virgin’
By Audrey Cefaly. Directed by Kate Alexander. Runs June 29-July 31 in Florida Studio Theatre’s Keating Theatre, 1241 N. Palm Ave., Sarasota. 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New neighbors find common ground in FST play ‘Maytag Virgin’
