Maytag Virgin @ Theatre Three
—Martha Heimberg
Can a couple of 40-ish high school teachers in a small Alabama town overcome personal grief, different religious backgrounds, pigheaded opinions about where to put the clothes dryer, and still manage to find love on their neighboring back porches?
It’s gotta happen, right? But it’ll take a whole year (or in theater time, two hours, two acts and an intermission) in Theatre Three’s happy production of Maytag Virgin, Audrey Cefaly’s surprising and charming two-hander, directed by Whitney LaTrice Coulter at Bryant Hall’s intimate black box theater on the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys campus. (It’s a temporary venue while there’s construction at T3’s Quadrangle home.)
This is a much-anticipated regional premiere for Theatre Three. Worth the wait? You betcha.
We hear Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin’” as we get seated, and take in Jeffrey Schmidt’s playful, telling set design featuring a pair of identically constructed back porches. But wait. One is decorated with bright paint, trellised flowers, and even a bottle tree. The other is cluttered with scattered cardboard boxes, a white clothes dryer, a beer cooler, and a statue of the Virgin Mary by the steps. A large, stylized tree in the background depicts seasonal changes as time goes by. In the foreground marking the property line is a double clothesline with laundry hung out to dry. It’s an obsession of our heroine—who, we soon learn, has more hang-ups than her clothesline.
Lights up, and out her back door bounces Lizzy (a sparkling, combustible Tiffany Solano), carrying a pie and smiling like the risen sun. She greets her new neighbor Jack (a contained, deliberate Ian Ferguson), the new high school physics teacher who’s moving in next door. Jack offers Lizzy a cold Coke, and they get to talking.
Right away, we learn they are both childless. Her husband died in a construction accident; his wife died from cancer. Clearly, they hit if off—but, of course, there’s a lot of push and pull going on from the outset. After all, this is not the first time Jack and Lizzie have been down the romance road.
But they keep talking, through scene and season changes, flirting , arguing, reporting on encounters with other people. We can’t help cheering for these attractive, lonely people as we watch them struggle through their particular modes of dealing with loss, rejection and the quirky compromises each of them makes—all to keep their broken hearts beating. Who doesn’t know what that feel like?
Director Coulter keeps this talky play physically and emotionally fluid throughout. As they wrangle their stubborn viewpoints—that dryer does NOT belong outside—Jack and Lizzy fold laundry, hang Christmas decorations, and enjoy a special supper he cooks for her.
When Jack finds a box of love letters from the deceased elderly couple who used to own his house, they read them together. Will the old man’s words to his dead wife break the dam of withheld feelings between Jack and Lizzy?
Romantic plays depend greatly on chemistry between actors, and the slow heat generated between Solano and Ferguson grows with each encounter. Solano has more of the lines for most of the play, and that’s just fine. She’s compelling to watch as she teases on a pretty dress or furiously slams a door, testing her attraction to Jack against old memories of betrayal and deceit, including her own guilt.
Ferguson’s patient, good-humored Jack is a solid backboard against which his neighbor swings for a winner, giving the chatty Lizzy the special gravitas of love, which includes seeing and hearing the beloved. Late in the play, Jack’s determined scene with Lizzy allows this first-rate actor to show his enough-of-this, virile appeal.
WHEN: Through February 20
WHERE: Bryant Hall, Kalita Humphreys Campus, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. (enter off Blackburn)
WEB: theatre3dallas.com
