Gina Gionfriddo correctly surmises that there's reason to be as cynical today as William Makepeace Thackeray was in the 1840s when he wrote Vanity Fair about the cunning rise of Becky Sharp. Unfortunately, her new play Becky Shaw -- now at Second Stage after a critically acclaimed run at last year's Humana Festival -- is as bogus as a Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, and made none the better by Peter DuBois' often poor direction and some surprisingly bad performances.

In this new work, Gionfriddo -- whose day job is a writer and producer on Law & Order -- suggests that contemporary society is a snake pit in which people communicate by forever administering tongue-lashings to each other, an[...]