Writing From the Middle of the Wreckage
on memoir, dissociation, and dresses that cut
This week, I did something I’ve never done before: I started writing a memoir play. Not fictionalized. Not inspired by. I mean memoir. And not just mine—but my twin sister’s, too. Evie and Star is the most personal piece I’ve ever written, and maybe the scariest. Because it’s not just a story. It’s a reckoning. With my past, with my body, with the systems that failed us both. And with the parts of myself I didn't even know I'd left behind until I wrote them down.
Reader, I didn’t know I’d dissociated. I didn’t. Not like that. Not in that language. But writing this play has been like unspooling a wire from inside my own head. Suddenly, the silence in certain scenes isn’t dramatic effect—it’s me, vanishing in real time. The fear, the freeze, the hyper-competence? That’s not a character arc. That’s survival. And I think this play is the first time I’ve told the truth about that. Not prettied up for stage direction. Not tucked under a monologue. Just... the ugly, aching, systemic truth.
It hits different than my other plays. Don’t get me wrong—I love the tenderness of Maytag Virgin, the lyrical sparring of The Gulf, the symbolic excavation of Alabaster. But this one? It doesn’t glide. It lurches. It forgets things. It loops and stalls and plays with time like memory does when it’s been through the wash too many times. It’s full of sentient handbags, TSA bins, clipboard-wielding bureaucrats who stamp “hope” as incomplete. And still—at the center of it—are two women, dressed in childhood fiberglass ballgowns, coughing and cracking and still trying to walk forward together.
We never wore the dresses outside. Our mother made them from brocade curtains she found at the Montgomery Junior League rummage sale. We played princess in the living room until the fabric started to itch. Until we couldn’t stop coughing. And now I wonder if that was always the metaphor: the dream we couldn’t breathe inside. In the play, we’re still wearing them. And they’re made of glass. Shards flake off when we move. Memory, literally, hurts.
I want to pitch Evie and Star as an animated limited series. With stylized 2D visuals. With purses that whisper and corners of memory that fold in on themselves. With sentient handbags and chorus agents who stamp grief like paperwork. Because this story is mine—but it’s also all of ours. Anyone who’s ever clawed their way through red tape. Anyone who’s been told to perform recovery for a system that doesn’t want them well. It’s not just a memoir. It’s a survival story. With teeth.
And here’s what I’ll say to my fellow playwrights: go there. Whatever “there” is. If it scares you, that’s the signal. If it makes you wince, that’s the way in. The further you get from your comfort zone, the closer you get to your emotional coordinates. Not the polished version. The real one. The one that aches and contradicts and glitches and reveals. That’s where the truth is hiding—not behind the plot, but under the floorboards of what you almost said.
Write the version you think no one wants. The one you think is too weird, too raw, too personal. I promise: it will reach someone. It will become the flashlight in their own fog. Evie and Star is teaching me that. I thought I was writing about my sister. Turns out, I was finally writing myself all the way into the room.
Read the full script of Evie and Star on NPX:
https://newplayexchange.org/script/3238392/evie-and-star
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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.
I am honored to have read it - really brave, unabashedly feminist.
I am so glad you’re going there! That’s it! I look forward to reading the play. You are so brave and stronger than you know.