Digital Program

 When I wrote Maytag Virgin, I didn’t think I was writing an autobiographical play.
Eleven years later, I’m not so sure.
Six weeks before the Washington, DC world premiere in October 2015, my husband, Mark, died of renal failure. I was directing the production myself, and because my son was fifteen, we moved rehearsals into my home so I wouldn’t have to leave him alone for long stretches at night.
There I was, newly widowed, rehearsing a play about a woman whose husband had died.
The parallels were entirely unintentional. And profoundly surreal.
One evening, while frantically digging through the house for props, I opened a box and found our Christmas stockings—his and hers. Mark had been gone only days. I hadn’t yet begun the work of sorting through his things, though I knew it was waiting for me: the clothes, the belongings, the obvious things you brace yourself to touch. What I hadn’t anticipated were all the things I wouldn’t know to brace myself for. Grief has an extraordinary capacity for hiding in places you haven’t thought to look yet. Christmas stockings. A decoration packed away for eleven months. A note tucked somewhere you forgot existed.
The discovery stopped me cold. I sat there for a long while, holding those stockings in my hands.
Thinking. Crying.
And then, because I am a playwright, I used it.
I gave the experience to Lizzy in two pieces. I added a line about having finally given away the last of Jesse’s things. And then, later, while decorating her porch, I let her discover their Christmas stockings—the things she hadn’t known were still there. That tiny contradiction suddenly contained something I had only just learned myself: you can decide you are finished with the objects of a life, but grief does not particularly care what you have decided.
I would not have found that moment had my own husband not died.
Sometimes you have to live a thing in order to write about it.
Something similar happened with a bedsheet. I had pulled one from my own laundry closet for Jack and Lizzy to fold together onstage. During rehearsal, I watched Jack fold it while talking about Amy, his beloved late wife, and suddenly I saw it: the sheet was no longer just a sheet. In his hands, it became a burial shroud.
I asked the actor to handle it with that kind of tenderness—to fold and hold it as though he were, in some small way, tending to Amy.
These were discoveries I could not have planned for when I wrote the play. They came from standing inside grief while directing a play about grief, and recognizing, in real time, what ordinary objects can hold.
Those weeks changed Maytag Virgin. My lived experience was altering the play even as we rehearsed it. I began to understand the thousand small ways an absence reveals itself—not only in photographs and possessions, but in chores you didn’t know someone was doing, routines that suddenly belong to you, relationships that shift, and ordinary moments in which you instinctively reach toward someone who is no longer there.
And with eleven years of distance, I can see something else: I was encoded into this play much more deeply than I understood when I wrote it.
Lizzy’s hunger for connection, her complicated understanding of the man she lost, her longing to be fully known and fully alive—these things were closer to the bone than I realized.
There is something else eleven years of distance has changed: the language we use to read women like Lizzy.
In 2015, “Karen” had not yet entered the cultural vocabulary in the way it has today. A contemporary audience might be tempted, at first glance, to put Lizzy in that box. She is frenetic. Anxious. Particular. She has opinions about how things ought to be done and very little difficulty sharing them.
But Lizzy is not a Karen.
Her new neighbor is testing every ounce of her resolve even as he is pulling her toward him. And he will not indulge her nonsense. What he does instead is something far more dangerous: he sees her. He accepts her contradictions. And because Jack is carrying a profound absence of his own—because some part of him is still very much in love with Amy—neither of them is in a position to rescue the other.
That matters to me.
Jack’s levelheaded calm gives Lizzy somewhere to set down some of her anxiety. Lizzy’s restless insistence on life pushes against the careful boundaries Jack has built around his own. Their intimacy is not immediate, and it is not easy. The play gives them time. Nearly a year passes before they so much as touch.
I think that slowness is essential. They do not tumble into one another to escape their grief. They spend a year learning how to be in the presence of another human being without asking that person to erase what came before.
Maybe that is one of the strange gifts of writing. Sometimes the work knows something about us before we do.
I have come to think of grief as a kind of radical inventory. It asks: Who am I now without this person? What remains? What changes? What do I carry forward?
And grief does not walk a straight line. As Jack says in the play, it is like “a crazy ex-girlfriend with a shotgun.” It is unpredictable. It disappears and reappears. It waits in boxes. It waits in holidays and rituals and chores. Just when you think you understand the shape of the absence, life finds another way to show it to you.
But Maytag Virgin has never been, for me, a play simply about loss.
It is about what comes after.
It is about two people trying to solve the terrible arithmetic of staying and leaving. About what happens after the storm, when time arrives and simply waits for us to catch up. About finding buoyancy in the familiar and, sometimes, in another person who is carrying damage of their own.
Jack and Lizzy cannot undo what happened to each other. They cannot restore the people they lost or return themselves to the people they were before.
What they can do is see each other.
Eleven years ago, I thought I understood that.
I understand it differently now.
And I suspect, eleven years from now, I will understand it differently still.
--Audrey Cefaly