THEATRE REVIEW / Waiting for the Cats: A Bait-and-Switch at The Fringe

Review by Rick Boettger of Audrey Cefaly’s The Gulf

I went to The Fringe expecting “community theater” and instead was blindsided by a two-person tour de force. This simple love story about two gals flats fishing the Gulf off Alabama grabbed first my attention, then my funny bone, and finally my heart, choking me up at the end of its 80 tight one-act minutes.

It tells us 90% of the story in the first minute. The sexy gal is prattling on about some woman with 15 cats, while her serious soulmate is just trying to just fish, thank you. The cats are a recurrent leitmotif, most humorously when the idea of a “cat fry” comes up from a comparison of fishing and taking care of cats. That leitmotif made me think of Becket’s absent “God” in Waiting for Godot, the most famous of the two-actor plays that ramble around without much if any plot.

But, like True West and The Dumbwaiter, it too is transfixing due to the sheer brilliance of the writing—but only if very talented actors can pull it off. And here they did. The sexy one, Betty, played by Jillian Todd, has one of the longest parts I can remember outside of one of O’Neill’s four-hour plays—over 6,000 words.  At first her patter does not seem to matter much, she is sight-acting, demurely winding her beautiful form around the back seat of their flats boat.

Here’s where I have to start giving star status to the director, Rebecca Tomlinson. I don’t see how it would be possible for an actor to know how their body language was interfacing with the dialog—it takes the director’s eye to appreciate and guide what the audience experience would be. I found myself captivated by both her physicality, and increasingly with the light seriousness, the hidden romance of her long rambles toward her taciturn lover—who, as she repeats, “just wants to fish,” hiding darkly upstage under her hoody.

As in other famous two-actor plays, something happens, but not much. What The Gulf does is fascinate an old, inveterate cis-hetero male, with a love story about two classic lesbians, working out their futures together. (My main qualifications for writing this review is that I’ve known ~5 lesbian couples, which obviously makes me an authority, and my two English degrees minoring in theater from Sophocles to Stoppard.) It surprises at the end with the most intense love, both sweet and sour, coming out of the serious one, Kendra—and resolves the dialectic with a satisfying synthesis, what we all hope to settle before committing to a life mate.

How on earth did this happen? Okay, it only takes a bright local or two to select the finest plays in Anglo theater for us lucky Key Westers, but how do you scare up actresses like Jillian and Sarah Goodwin, the serious fisherwoman? Well, both are lifelong actors, Sarah starting as a Midsummers’ Night fairy as a child, and spending, surprise, 12 years in Manhattan before moving down here, like most of us, to relax in the sunshine. Jillian is a rarer bird. She moved down here to make the performing arts her profession. How daft is that?

Hooray for us carousing fisherfolk of Key West for supporting the arts well enough that Jillian can! She gets enough acting roles at different theaters—I don’t want to know what the Fringe can afford to pay because it will make me feel exploitative for just watching–and she also sings with her guitar at classic Duval music venues like Two Friends and Hogs Breath. Add singing and guitar to what I just saw? I’m afraid to show up, my head might explode.

Small theater has lightened my whole life. As a card payer in SF, at the Improv on Union. At Cal, the Berkeley Rep. In law school, the Yale Rep. So glad to find the Waterfront and Red Barn when I moved here, and now the Fringe, who in their first season starred our dear Connie Gilbert, dual Best Man and Maid of Honor at my wedding to Cynthia, now fulfilling my life as a patron of these arts.