Becky Shaw Broadway Reviews

*CRITIC'S PICK* With Trip Cullman’s Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater, where it opened on Monday night, I mean that as a compliment. Besides which, the play’s male characters are also magnificently flawed. We don’t requ...

*CRITIC'S PICK* With Trip Cullman’s Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater, where it opened on Monday night, I mean that as a compliment. Besides which, the play’s male characters are also magnificently flawed. We don’t require a rooting interest in them as individuals to be caught up in the story. The cast is terrific. The show moves fast. The many laugh lines land.

While Becky is the catalyst for the play’s chain reaction — and Brewer nimbly inhabits the charged space between exploited and exploiter — it’s the seemingly impenetrable Max who is at last cracked open. Ehrenreich is superb in the role, as u...

While Becky is the catalyst for the play’s chain reaction — and Brewer nimbly inhabits the charged space between exploited and exploiter — it’s the seemingly impenetrable Max who is at last cracked open. Ehrenreich is superb in the role, as unafraid to be horrid as he eventually is to be broken. In a quintet of fine performances, his stands out in this moment so removed from when Becky Shaw debuted (2008 was not bursting at the seams with essays on our crisis of masculinity). “You are a rich man who puts his family in a two-star hotel,” Susan snaps at Max. “That’s what you are.” That may be part of what he is, but Ehrenreich makes clear that the miserable truth of Max is that he’s not really a man at all. He’s a boy who’s been taught that power will save him.

First produced in New York by Second Stage off-Broadway, the play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009. The same company has revived it at its Broadway house, the Hayes Theater, in a crisply staged and terrifically acted production directed by Trip ...

First produced in New York by Second Stage off-Broadway, the play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009. The same company has revived it at its Broadway house, the Hayes Theater, in a crisply staged and terrifically acted production directed by Trip Cullman that keeps the play’s serrated edges as cutting as ever.

Cullman’s revival, which marks Becky Shaw’s Broadway debut, serves its plot very well. The production moves fast—even the set changes (to David Zinn’s fine set) have humor and purpose, and Kaye Voyce’s costume design is perfection—and all...

Cullman’s revival, which marks Becky Shaw’s Broadway debut, serves its plot very well. The production moves fast—even the set changes (to David Zinn’s fine set) have humor and purpose, and Kaye Voyce’s costume design is perfection—and all five actors are first-class, including the scene-stealing Linda Emond as Susie’s acidic mother, Susan, who is prone to Lucille Bluth–esque judgments from on high. Which characters you root in the play’s romantic rectangle may reveal something about your own character, but it speaks to the strength of the writing and performances that a credible argument is possible for all of them. As dark as it sometimes gets, the play encourages all of us to see the good inside even damaged goods.

Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 class-conscious satire receives a pitch-perfect revival in the new Broadway production directed by Trip Cullman for Second Stage Theater. With its expert cast firing on all cylinders, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Becky Shaw s...

Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 class-conscious satire receives a pitch-perfect revival in the new Broadway production directed by Trip Cullman for Second Stage Theater. With its expert cast firing on all cylinders, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Becky Shaw sends laughter rocketing throughout the audience with its scathing portrayal of social mores being blown to smithereens.

Let’s begin with the playwriting. Gionfriddo’s script is lean and mean (quite literally). With just five characters she crafts a compelling story about damaged souls tied together by fate and desperation. Two of them spew unvarnished truth like r...

Let’s begin with the playwriting. Gionfriddo’s script is lean and mean (quite literally). With just five characters she crafts a compelling story about damaged souls tied together by fate and desperation. Two of them spew unvarnished truth like rattlesnakes spitting out venom. And while it’s loaded with zingers, there’s nothing contrived here. The lines are as perceptive as they are brutally funny.

When the laughter fades and you've wiped your hands of these utterly unlikable characters, all the upsetting questions they pondered remain. Becky Shaw touches something tender and doesn't stop there. Like its namesake's devious smile, it lingers. Gr...

When the laughter fades and you've wiped your hands of these utterly unlikable characters, all the upsetting questions they pondered remain. Becky Shaw touches something tender and doesn't stop there. Like its namesake's devious smile, it lingers. Grade: A–

But this nuanced and funny American play — underrated until now — does illuminate the corrosive power of very needy people and their ability to take down others to fill their own voids. It struck me as an interesting choice for a first date in th...

But this nuanced and funny American play — underrated until now — does illuminate the corrosive power of very needy people and their ability to take down others to fill their own voids. It struck me as an interesting choice for a first date in that it should spark immediate conversation as to whether either party wants a second one.

Gionfriddo, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Becky Shaw” and “Rapture, Blister, Burn,” is a master of dialogue. Her characters, particularly Max and the Slaters, live to fight; tearing each other apart is, in its own warped way, a form of affec...

Gionfriddo, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Becky Shaw” and “Rapture, Blister, Burn,” is a master of dialogue. Her characters, particularly Max and the Slaters, live to fight; tearing each other apart is, in its own warped way, a form of affection. And it helps that both Emond (one of the best enunciators in the theater) and Ehrenreich are so verbally dexterous. Credit to director Trip Cullman for staging the show to highlight their jousting — at times “Becky Shaw” feels like “The Birdcage” by way of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Seventeen years after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Gina Gionfriddo’s dark, sometimes giddy comedy Becky Shaw finally arrives on Broadway, and noting that it was worth the wait is an understatement none of its brutally honest anti-heroes wo...

Seventeen years after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Gina Gionfriddo’s dark, sometimes giddy comedy Becky Shaw finally arrives on Broadway, and noting that it was worth the wait is an understatement none of its brutally honest anti-heroes would make. And if the nearly two-decades-in-the-making arrival meant we had to wait for this excellent cast to come together, all the better.

The audience gasped almost as frequently as it laughed during the performance I attended of “Becky Shaw,” Gina Gionfriddo’s fierce, funny comedy that revolves around a bad blind date. What audibly startled the audience wasn’t what happens to ...

The audience gasped almost as frequently as it laughed during the performance I attended of “Becky Shaw,” Gina Gionfriddo’s fierce, funny comedy that revolves around a bad blind date. What audibly startled the audience wasn’t what happens to the characters, which is one disaster after another, all skillfully plotted, but what some of the characters say to one another. In the play’s complicated web of relationships, these characters feel free to deliver what they consider the truth, but what they say often sounds more like insult than insight. That theatergoers are unlikely to wind up dismissing any of these blunt-speaking characters as complete boors is a testament to the playwright’s rich, nuanced writing, and the layered portrayals by the stellar five-member cast, three of whom are making impressive Broadway debuts. “Becky Shaw” is opening tonight at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater on Broadway, one block north and seventeen years after Second Stage’s Off-Broadway production of the play, which has not lost its sting.

Second Stage, which produced its off-Broadway premiere, has brought it back for a Broadway premiere that’s damn near perfect. Directed by Trip Cullman with a dynamism that perfectly matches Gionfriddo’s ever-surprising sensibilities, it introduce...

Second Stage, which produced its off-Broadway premiere, has brought it back for a Broadway premiere that’s damn near perfect. Directed by Trip Cullman with a dynamism that perfectly matches Gionfriddo’s ever-surprising sensibilities, it introduces four pitch-perfect performances before its titular character even appears. Until then, it reacquaints us with mean comedy, the type that punches every which way without stooping to aimless, Scrappy-Doo belligerence. (Well, almost. Some stray jokes clearly cut for edginess might have been updated, along with references to The Love Boat and Jerry Lewis’ MDA telethons. But no matter.)

That is the genius of Gionfriddo’s script, and of Cullman’s clockwork direction, which relies on the cast to help change scenes in ways that suggest the precision timing of an old-fashioned bedroom farce. I’m a bit puzzled by the stylized simpl...

That is the genius of Gionfriddo’s script, and of Cullman’s clockwork direction, which relies on the cast to help change scenes in ways that suggest the precision timing of an old-fashioned bedroom farce. I’m a bit puzzled by the stylized simplicity of David Zinn’s set, a mostly blank and interchangeable black-box space that unfolds in the final scene to reveal a generic upper-middle-class sitting room, brightly lit by Stacey Derosier. But that choice does help strip away any and all outside distractions so that we can focus more clearly on the archetypal characters who are not rooted in any particular place. They seem to be stepping straight out of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, with all their flaws and contradictions and raw humanity on display.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable selling point for a New York play than a bad date. The humiliation, disappointment, confusion and hilarity of a date gone awry is an evergreen anecdote, the grist for good gossip and perhaps even bette...

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable selling point for a New York play than a bad date. The humiliation, disappointment, confusion and hilarity of a date gone awry is an evergreen anecdote, the grist for good gossip and perhaps even better comedy. Such is the pitch of Becky Shaw, Second Stage Theater’s new production of Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 play, which promises a blind date that, of course, “spirals spectacularly off the rails”. Even nearly 20 years later, one person’s bad date is another’s great theater, though the inciting incident for this taut and frequently funny play’s interpersonal disaster is less romantic horror than four cases of festering emotional trauma. It makes for a strange brew of narcissism, cynicism and manipulation which still somehow, despite its poison, manages to cast a nostalgic glow on the pre-smartphone dating era.

Gionfriddo’s play clearly covers a lot of risky ground — gender, race, politics, money — only it’s so relentlessly hysterical you barely notice the mark it leaves until the appetizers arrive. Adding to the entertainment, director Trip Cullman...

Gionfriddo’s play clearly covers a lot of risky ground — gender, race, politics, money — only it’s so relentlessly hysterical you barely notice the mark it leaves until the appetizers arrive. Adding to the entertainment, director Trip Cullman’s direction is sexy, light and swift.

There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-fa...

There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-farce full of caricatures and not people. Thus, Max’s more reactionary points and Susan’s nihilism dilute the clarity of the ideas the show gestures toward: the compromise and ignorance necessary for love to function, the importance of incorporating others' pain into your existence, the way power is wielded between loved ones, the weakening of a generation by way of therapy talk. Though 150 minutes worth of poison-dart dialogue is fun to watch, by the end of the show, I couldn’t figure out what it was aiming for.

Becky Shaw is a breath of fresh satirical air, refreshing in our oversensitive, overcautious times (a scene where Becky talks about her complicated past with Black men is masterfully cringe). Do you savor the stylish sadism of novelist Ottessa Moshfe...

Becky Shaw is a breath of fresh satirical air, refreshing in our oversensitive, overcautious times (a scene where Becky talks about her complicated past with Black men is masterfully cringe). Do you savor the stylish sadism of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh? Then hie thee to Becky Shaw.