Love, loss and a dryer on the porch

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 19, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Today’s Toppman on the Arts is sponsored by The Mint Museum. “Caravaggio | Revolution: Baroque Masterpieces from the Roberto Longhi Foundation” offers a rare opportunity to see an original Caravaggio painting in Charlotte. On view through Oct. 25 at Mint Museum Uptown.

by Lawrence Toppman

One of the small pleasures of seeing “Maytag Virgin” is trying to figure out what the title means. The first word is obvious: Jack (Dalton Riddle) has moved to a south Alabama town to teach high school physics and installed a Maytag dryer on his porch, much to the consternation of neighbor Lizzie (Aimee Thomas). She, an English teacher at the school on a leave of absence, thinks it’s too private and obtrusive an appliance to be stuck metaphorically under her nose.

The second word is tougher. Both characters have been married, and “virgin” doesn’t apply to sex. I finally decided it relates to Lizzie’s potential for joy: She has reached early middle age, married and lost a spouse, yet still never experienced lasting bliss. Audrey Cefaly’s two-act play takes her on a journey to determine whether she can.

Cefaly takes her time but doesn’t waste ours. The show runs two-and-a-quarter hours with an intermission, a long span for a two-hander, and events transpire over exactly a year. That’s because both Jack and Lizzie must emerge slowly from different cocoons of sadness.

He has just lost a beloved wife to cancer; she grieves not because of her husband’s death but because she felt nothing for him and foresees a lifetime of anhedonia, the inability to experience happiness under any circumstances. (Woody Allen flirted with that word as a title before choosing “Annie Hall.”)

Carolina Actors Studio Theatre, better known as CAST, tries gamely to produce its trademark experiential theater wherever it goes, and that’s true at The Arts Factory. Stacks of towels rest on a table in the lobby; an usher acknowledges your presence from behind an ironing board; laundry hangs over a concessions counter. Your token of entry is a clothespin which, alas, you may not keep.

But because the facility’s small, and CAST doesn’t control it, the company can’t transform it the way it did previous homes on Clement Avenue and North Davidson Street. You have to wait until you get into the black box theater to feel immersed in the atmosphere of the show.

There Tim Baxter-Ferguson’s intricate set drops us into the common area between casual handyman Jack and the more artistic, beauty-focused Lizzie. Lighting designer Kel Wright and sound operator Kelly Sandoval have us seeing summer lightning and hearing bullfrogs, dogs, passing lawnmowers and planes.

Director Michael Simmons has used his space shrewdly and drawn naturalistic performances from Riddle and Thomas. Jack seems at first to be a simple character: good-natured, patient, flexible, openhearted. Yet after winning our affection, Riddle’s just as credible revealing Jack’s complexities as the play evolves.

Lizzie changes moods constantly in the opening scene: neighborliness, flirtatiousness, eccentric humor, defensiveness about other women. Thomas hits all the high spots, but she’s actually too natural when Lizzie becomes shy or anxious. She drops her voice, the way a person would in life, to near-inaudibility when she moves around or turns away from us. (I got almost everything she said, but that’s because I sat dead center in the theater.)

And you’ll want to hear what she has to say. Like another forlorn, 40-ish Lizzie, who blossoms upon the arrival of a charismatic, handsome younger man in the play “The Rainmaker,” her transformation moves us. I was especially touched by one quiet, almost throwaway exchange.

“Does it still hurt?” she asks, after bandaging Jack’s cut foot. “A little,” he admits. “A little’s better than nothing,” she murmurs to herself. Lizzie lives in a world where any kind of feeling — even pain — comes as a relief after no feelings at all. As we watch her try to rise above that emptiness, Thomas has us firmly in her corner.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.