Gulfshore Playhouse’s ‘Maytag Virgin’ a multifaceted gem of a story

To think of “Maytag Virgin” solely as a story of inching toward romance in the heavy cloak of widow and widowerhood is to sell Audrey Cefaly’s writing short. The current production at Gulfshore Playhouse subtly peels back layers of its characters’ personalities to show how experience, family and theology forge their responses to life as much as love. 

We grieve ourselves when Lizzy Nash talks of her “most disappointing” student, a brilliant writer who tore up his essay rather than read it aloud. Only a woman who has declined to fight fate would let a student walk away without swearing to help him. And we cringe at Jack Key’s insistence no one should pray for him after his wife’s death from cancer — after all, he’s a healthy man, isn’t he?

Harriet Howard Heithaus, Naples Daily News