Walking With Tennessee Williams
The Craft of Holding On: Confessions of a Southern Intimist
When the Labels Don’t Quite Fit
There’s a few comparisons I get from time to time. Folks’ll say my work is Southern Gothic, or they’ll bring up Tennessee Williams because of the lyricism or the damaged women or the heat. And listen, I’m not mad at that—I love Tennessee. I love what he taught us about longing and ruin and beautiful sentences.
But neither label quite fits what I’m doing.
Yes, I’m Southern. Yes, my plays are full of grief and ghosts and women who’ve been through hell. And yes, I care a whole lot about how the words sound—the rhythm, the breath, the silence between things. But I’m not interested in writing collapse just for the sake of it. I’m not here to burn it all down or sit in the rubble forever. I’m writing about people who keep showing up—who don’t disappear, even when they want to. People who stay with themselves. Who stay in the story.
Writing Toward the Storm Inside
Williams said once, “I’ve always been more afraid of the thunder inside than the storm outside,” and yeah, I feel that in my bones. That’s what I write toward. Emotional weather. The kind you can’t see but can absolutely feel in your chest. Like a pressure drop before the rain. Like something shifting in the room before anyone says a word.
Williams’ characters often break in big ways—Blanche gets taken away. Tom walks out. Alma figures it out right when it’s too late. His plays end in collapse. In ghost-light. And there’s beauty in that, for sure. No shade at all to writers who want to tell those stories—I love plenty of them. But I guess I’m more interested in what happens if they don’t collapse. If they hang on.
The Quiet Fight
Take June in Alabaster. Scarred up, stubborn as hell, painting on barn wood, talking to a goat. She’s not okay. But she’s still reaching. Still creating. Or Evie in Evie and Star—she shows up at her sister’s house with a history of addiction, no custody of her kids, and a desperate kind of hope that’s just barely holding her together. But she’s there. She’s trying.
That’s the stuff I’m drawn to. The quiet fight. The barely-holding-on. The reaching for someone else, even when you don’t know how to say what you need.
On Being a “Regional” Writer
People love to call work like mine regional. That’s code, sometimes, for less than. Like if it doesn’t take place in New York or feature high-rise apartments and sharp-tongued urbanites, it can’t be art—it’s just flavor. Folks hear Southern accents and assume the play is going to be “sweet” or “charming.” As if smallness means softness.
But I’m not writing sweetness. I’m writing survival. And if my characters are sitting on porches or in barns or funeral homes, it’s not because they’re simple—it’s because that’s where the hard conversations happen. That’s where silence stretches long enough to let the truth come through.
A Note to My Fellow Writers
So here’s what I’ll say to my fellow writers: write in whatever style doesn’t let you look away. Don’t write cute if what you feel is chaos. Don’t smooth the edges to make the thing marketable. And please—please—don’t let your characters wilt into upholstery and vanish.
Let them fight. Let them claw their way toward something. Let them be messy and holy and tired and still willing to try.
Write the version of them that George Saunders calls their “full expansiveness.” Not the version that’s quiet and acceptable and resigned. The one that still believes something could change.
And as for me? I’m not walking in Tennessee’s footsteps. I’m walking beside his ghost. And every now and then I turn to him and whisper:
“What if she doesn’t die at the end?”
“What if they love each other anyway?”
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Audrey Cefaly's plays (Alabaster, Maytag Virgin, The Gulf, The Last Wide Open, Trouble) have garnered the Lammy Award, the Calicchio Prize, the NNPN Goldman Prize, the Edgerton, and a Pulitzer nomination. Her works have been produced at Signature Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Barter Theatre, Merrimack Rep, Florida Studio, Florida Rep, Gulfshore Playhouse, and countless others. Cefaly is a Dramatist Guild Foundation "Traveling Master," an Arena Stage playwright cohort, and a recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is published by Concord Theatricals, Applause Books, Smith & Kraus and TRW.
Beautiful.