←Recommendations of Evie and Star

This represents Audrey Cefaly at her most audacious and expressionistic: The story of two sisters tethered by blood and fondness and creativity, but torn apart by mental illness, substance abuse, time and mortality. A wildly theatrical cry of the heart that is an experimental director’s dream. A play about chaos and connection, wellness, woe and the wide-eyed wonder of being a sibling.

Everything Audrey writes is packed with an emotional wallop. Evie and Star has it threaded through each scene. As I read it I felt inside the story with these sisters wanting to help them because Audrey is better than any writer I know at created space for empathy when characters need it the most. With Evie and Star she has crafted a mesmerizing journey full of joy and love and sadness and life.

This play illustrates the raw, real feelings we experience as the loved one of an addict. The pain of watching them fail and suffer, the joy we experience when their true self shines though, the torment that is the unending loop of hope and sorrow. The loveliest thing about this tribute to the playwright's sister is that even at its grittiest, it's never maudlin, nor overly romantic. It's a record of the awesome reasons she loved her sister so deeply. Gorgeous play.

Audrey Cefaly brings her masterful command of language and emotion to a most personal, haunting, and gorgeous tribute. This play is a testament to what it's like to love someone not only with addiction but who is your other half, who shares your DNA. Like all Cefaly plays, it will break open your heart--be prepared.

Audrey is such a compelling playwright - her words are both battering rams and peacock feathers. This play is complicated. Gifted actors and theatre practitioners have a lot to put their hands in. Audrey’s use of stage directions, a shifting Greek Chorus and imaginative changes of scene make for a gorgeous, engaging, visceral backdrop. But nothing - absolutely nothing - obscures or weakens the characterization of twin sisterhood. Because that is the main character - neither Evie nor Star - but their relationship.

There's a bruised human heart driving this memory play and it's delivered in a savvy wrapping of savagely funny barbed wire. Absolutely uncompromising in dramatizing its characters' traumas but it never feels punishing, partly because of the endlessly inventive theatricality with which it unfolds, and partly because there is absolute unmitigated joy in following these two characters and their self-amused hilarity and their love for language. And for each other.

This tender and harrowing memory play celebrates the enduring connection between twin sisters whose lives have taken different paths. As the existence of this play illustrates, one has found her voice and her calling while the other is plagued by addiction. One knows the pain of loving an addict. One knows the pain of trying to find her way out of addiction. Their memories are leavened with delinquent adventures and bursts of humor (I will never again hear the name Cam Newton without smiling).