←Recommendations of The Gulf

Cefaly’s beautifully taut play, The Gulf, embarks on a journey where two women desperately cling to the life raft of their relationship. You’ll be on the boat with them. You’ll feel the weight of their plight for agency and power and validation-from each other and a world that would just as soon set them adrift.

Language is the star of this play - from the natural-sounding regional dialect, to the humor, to the magical way the dialogue seems to expand the world and the stakes with every line. This play will have you leaning in, desperate to lap up every syllable. Still, it's truly character-driven, with two diametrically opposed leads whose patterns teach us so much about who they are and who they might be. Though it's set in a single location, the "gulf" between these women makes the story feel epic. This playwright trusts the audience; while there are no easy resolutions, it resonates.

The Gulf is a fresh and timely play, ambitious in its setting and characters, whose realism underscores its humanity.

The play begins slow, tense and drawn. About a third of the way through, it picks up pace and hooks you (pun intended), but it never releases. There's no tight resolution. You don't know what's going to happen to the two women in this play. And in reading, as I would imagine by seeing, you pry open the characters just enough to enter their world, then the lid closes and you're left, afloat with memory, no clear direction, and similarly wounded.

The Gulf is an elegant, stripped-down, powerful play. I loved the poetics of the title and setting--"the gulf" as physical and emotional landscape. The characters are engaging, funny, heartbreaking and believable. There's a Southern rhythm and poetry, and undertone of elegy, that infuses the play, and it builds to a tremendous intensity. It also puts poor, gay women on stage in full complex individuality, rather than as identity tokens. Beautiful work that should be seen all over the country (and the world).

Kendra and Betty are stuck in the shallows, both literally and figuratively, as their relationship founders to an end that neither is yet willing to acknowledge.
This dark comedy examines a dying relationship as the women fight move forward in their lives. The process is both harsh and humorous as the women hurt and seduce each other by degrees, breaking apart and coming back together a little less each time, in a process of long standing patterns that are both agonizing and comforting. It is a cycle that has become familiar but must ultimately change as the relationship ends.

Audrey Cefaly's THE GULF is a dangerous play. Explosive, dark and uniquely southern. From moment one, we are thrust into a curious world down in the Delta... two women out on a boat, night fishing. This play ticks by like a bomb on a timer. Wickedly funny and achingly real. Such a great play for 2 strong female actors, especially at the college level, but as in many of Audrey's pieces, her characters defy age limits. Kendra and Betty could be any age really. It's a great tonic for those female actors looking for something beyond the standard fare.

One of those shows that grabs you immediately and you are transported into this moment; one moment laughing, one moment surprised, but always engaging. Completely unique characters, and yet utterly relatable.