Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A narcissistic psychopath, an insecure dependent, a borderline, and a perpetual savior walk into a theater… and create one of the funniest and most profound plays in years. Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, which premiered in 2009 at Second Stage’s Off Broadway space, has burst onto Broadway in a riotously funny, razor-sharp revival from director Trip Cullman that’s less a clash of personalities than of personality disorders.
Alden Ehrenreich, in a remarkable Broadway debut, delivers a hilarious and yet nuanced performance as solipsistic alpha male Max, whose speedy one-liners and withering putdowns help him to avoid both discomfort and introspection. He plays a New York finance guy who’s been summoned to right the precarious fortunes of the family that basically adopted him as a boy after the early death of his own mother. Grief seems to have consumed his quasi-sister, Suzanna (Lauren Patten), a Brown grad student who compulsively watches true-crime TV and wallows in sadness while wearing inky cloaks of black attire like a millennial female Hamlet (costumes by Kaye Voyce). Meanwhile, her mother, Susan (Linda Emond), has already moved on to a new, much younger man while opting to ignore details about their much-depleted savings.
Max nudges Suzanna to check her sadness long enough to do something, which results in a ski trip where she meets a hyper-empathetic wannabe novelist named Andrew (Patrick Ball of The Pitt) whom she impulsively marries. Then the newlyweds invite Max over for a blind date with one of Andrew’s co-workers, a smart but not-entirely-stable young woman named Becky Shaw (played with sly perspicacity by Madeline Brewer of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange Is the New Black). It’s a memorably awkward first date from hell whose fallout encompasses all four of them in ever-shifting alliances.
Over the course of Gionfriddo’s expertly constructed dramedy, all four of the millennial characters subvert our expectations while remaining ultimately true to their fundamental characters (and diagnoses). Becky proves to be far from the delicate flower she presented in her opening scenes; Andrew is a nice guy who takes his white knight role far too seriously. Even Suzanna is forced to commit to a course of action that will define her future — and it’s not the one that she (or the audience) might have at first expected. Ball and Patten both bring a grounded believability to roles that are performative in less showy ways.
Only Suzanna’s mother remains fundamentally the same. She’s an ice queen from an earlier generation who, in a Tony-worthy turn by Emond, drops outrageously un-PC bon mots as easily as ice cubes into a highball. She also maintains a practical outlook on life that’s drained of either sentimentality or false hopes. She’s all too aware of her vulnerabilities, particularly the mutliple sclerosis that forces her to use a cane and that persuades her to tolerate an irresponsible boyfriend who might help her manage her inevitable decline.
Emond is well-matched in witty manipulation by Ehrenreich, who bulldozes through conversations with a brashness that never tips over into outright cruelty. His Max prides himself on being an honest broker — but with everybody except himself. Only in the final scene, when he realizes that his years of manipulative behavior are not producing the results he was expecting, do we finally see the hairline cracks in his Brooks Brothers-supplied suit of armor. Ehrenreich is a natural, a bully with a twinkle in his eye that tempts you to return for more abuse.
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. ★★★★★
BECKY SHAW
Hayes Theater, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 14 for $94 to $214