Review: Broadway Finally Meets Becky Shaw, and She’s Got a Sharp Tongue

By the final moments in plays of bad manners, writers so often succumb to the urge to tell you what it was all for. They can’t stomach the thought of audiences leaving the theater moral-less, the taste of irredeemably flawed behavior lingering on their palates. It’s Gina Gionfriddo’s iron guts that make an incisive, observant, scathing, and hilarious play like Becky Shaw possible.

Second Stage is finally presenting the dark comedy on Broadway 18 years after producing its off-Broadway premiere. During that grand orbit, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist has become a period piece, hinging on a blind date gone awry without any help from the now-ubiquitous apps.

But the abundance of flip phones in director Trip Cullman’s pulsating revival isn’t the only throwback in Becky Shaw. Between the political disarray of the past decade and the theater industry’s post-Covid recovery, the Broadway roster has leaned so heavily on ripped-from-the-headlines topicality that it’s almost jarring to enter a world that isn’t responding to current events. Your brain may even frantically scan the stage for it, only to find a collection of bumbling humans groping through their thorny but ultimately unremarkable lives and making up the rules as they go. It’s a brutal mirror, but a brilliant relief.

Of all the makeshift worldviews in Becky Shaw, the person preaching with the greatest resolve is Max (Alden Ehrenreich, droll and enthralling in a noteworthy Broadway debut). He’s an accomplished financial advisor who sees love as a utilitarian transaction and an excess of feelings as a waste of time. He even spends the whole opening scene stonewalling the wallowing Suzanna (Tony winner Lauren Patten, just as magnetic without a showstopping rock number), a psychology student whose grief over her four-months-dead father has dragged on too long for his taste. Never mind that the deceased is his own adoptive father and Suzanna is, for all intents and purposes, his sister. Those are just burdensome labels that muddy the waters—especially when the feelings between Max and Suzanna are more than familial.

Cut to eight months later: whatever damage their brief dalliance placed on these pseudo-siblings appears to have been shored up. Suzanna is now married to nice-guy Andrew (The Pitt’s Patrick Ball, giving a performance that unfolds steadily and peaks at the right time) while Max, resuming the role of capable brother, takes charge of logistical matters with Suzanna’s mother Susan, who suffers from both MS and a parasitic boyfriend (Linda Emond is brilliant as this unstoppable tide of offensive comments).

They’re so back to normal that Suzanna even facilitates a double date. The newlyweds set up bachelor Max with Becky, a temp at Andrew’s office. Taking on that title role is Madeline Brewer, a twinkling human grenade who broadcasts danger with just a smile and a misguided pink dress (perfectly tone-deaf costuming by Kaye Voyce).

Becky is Gionfriddo’s thinnest needle and most fascinating creation, especially when Brewer has so confidently sorted her many layers. An airy bimbo exterior gives way to a timid but astute observer who turns out to be the straightest shooter in this hyper-verbal bunch. I can already hear the dissenting opinions, but to use Becky Shaw’s namesake, Vanity Fair’s social climber Becky Sharp, as proof of her manipulative villainy is just so 19^th century. She’s no dummy, that’s without question. She knows how to stay under Max’s skin after their catastrophic date, and Andrew’s savior complex is as reliable as a sunrise. But take a step back and you’ll see everyone around her driving themselves into their own ditches. Becky’s simply sweeping the gravel off the road.

With these paths clear, Gionfriddo can sit back and let her play ask its own juicy questions. What makes a person “good”? What, if anything, do humans owe to each other? And to return to the Vanity Fair of it all, how is 21^st-century America just a warmed-over Victorian class system? (David Zinn’s attractive and remarkably efficient set displays the sliding scale of wealth among our characters.) From Becky’s financial straits and family estrangement; to Max’s dubious parentage; to Suzanna’s teetering family fortune; to Andrew’s tightrope walk between aspiring artist and career barista—no one’s status is secure, financial or otherwise.

But when the dust from this emotional Rube Goldberg machine settles, only the doe-eyed temp is left standing, her hand still on the inciting lever. What was it all for? If Gionfriddo won’t even divulge that to her characters, she’s certainly not telling you.