Becky Shaw review – Alden Ehrenreich shines in dysfunctional dating comedy
7 / 10
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.
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