In a way, Birmingham’s Terrific New Theatre owes Bobbie Gamble’s acting class at Greenville High School for “Love is a Blue Tick Hound,” a collection of plays getting its world premiere beginning Thursday night.

The Alabama Black Belt school is where two 14-year-olds, Audrey Cefaly and Carolyn Messina, became fast friends, bonding over a mutual love of theater. On Thursday, more than three decades later, Messina stars in “Clean” and “The Gulf,” two of the four plays that comprise playwright Cefaly’s “Love is a Blue Tick Hound.”

“We always knew Carolyn was going to go to New York, and she did,” Cefaly says of her high-school friend.

While Messina was training and working in New York and other places, Cefaly was attending Huntingdon College and, one winter, heading to the D.C. suburbs in Maryland for what she thought was a three-month stay.

“I was ready to head back to Huntingdon, and they said I was considered an out-of-state student now, so it was too expensive, and I met someone, and I ended up staying there,” Cefaly says. “My career has been in human resources for about 10 years, and now I’m a web designer.”

Cefaly was also acting, and sometime in her early 30s, when she couldn’t find the type play she wanted to act in with a friend of hers, she wrote it herself and entered it in a festival.

“As horrible as I think it is now looking at it,” Cefaly says of the work she says will remain unpublished, “it won the whole festival.”

Cefaly’s second one-act, “Fin & Euba,” won dozens of festivals, including 2006’s Strawberry One-Act Festival, with Cefaly and Messina playing the title characters.

“She’s just extraordinary,” Cefaly says of Messina. “I’ve been on stage with her many times, and it is the most thrilling experience.”

Messina also starred in Cefaly’s New York debut of “The Gulf,” which last year won the prestigious Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival and this year, as a full-length work, was produced at Virginia’s Signature Theatre.

“When I started writing full-length plays, it became apparent to me that was truly what I was meant to do,” Cefaly says.

And she couldn’t be doing it much better.

“In the past year, I’ve had a publishing and licensing deal from the most noted play publisher in the world, a regional world premiere at one of the top theaters in the country, and I got an agent,” Cefaly says. “You could go your whole life and not get any of those things as a playwright, and I got them all in one year.”

And now, TNT is presenting the world premiere of “Love is a Blue Tick Hound,” featuring “Fin & Euba,” “Clean,” “Stuck” and “The Gulf.”

All, Cefaly says, harken back to her roots, even though she’s living in Maryland raising her 19-year-old son.

“I do call myself a Southern writer because my focus is really the Southern voice,” says Cefaly, who is working on a play titled and set in “Alabaster.” “There’s a lyricism to it that pairs very well with my tendencies toward lyricism. Someone described ‘Fin & Euba’ as ‘Tennessee Williams goes to the trailer park,’ and I think that’s probably true of ‘The Gulf,’ as well. … When I write these stories, particularly if they are based at all on my history, it’s amazingly cathartic for me. They really hit home.”

Messina says Cefaly’s plays “are an actor’s dream.”

“She knows why the heart beats, what we all secretly long for,” Messina says. “She’s trying to take away the pain of the world, to tell stories of light and healing, so that we don’t feel so alone. … She gives an actor and an audience the permission to be as flawed as the human condition can get, and still we know someone is there to hold out a hand.”

Messina, who at 14 knew her friend was going places, wants to spread the word.

“I always knew she was that good, and I want everyone else to know, too,” she says. “And as an actor, I just don’t want to get in her way. I want to do it justice.”

“Love is a Blue Tick Hound,” by Audrey Cefaly, at Terrific New Theatre Dec. 8-17.  Tickets: www.terrificnewtheatre.com or 205-328-0868.

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