Alden Ehrenreich and Madeline Brewer in Becky Shaw.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
I have a theory that, in accordance with its desire to stand unequivocally and demonstrably against the rising tides of conservatism, American theater has, in the last decade or so, gotten very afraid to be mean.
This isn’t on the whole a bad thing — there is a fundamental need for the cultivation of empathy in the face of a movement that sells “Fuck Your Feelings” merch. At the same time, it can lead to a blurring of the ethos of process and the ethical exploration advanced by the art itself. We sometimes forget that we can build better institutions, run good rehearsal rooms, treat everyone involved like human beings, and also dig into some really nasty shit — that the former stuff is in fact part of the necessary groundwork for the latter. In the past ten years, I’ve encountered a lot of very anxious young actors: When a play asks for ugly things, they balk. The veil between character and self has frayed — bad behavior, even on stage, carries a frisson of shameful unease. It’s both understandable and tiresome. Where is our courage to face ourselves, to put aside our vain longing for innocence?
No wonder Gina Gionfriddo all but disappeared from the theater. In the aughts, the playwright was collecting prizes and fellowships; by 2013 she had her second Pulitzer nomination. Then, after 2017’s critically unloved Can You Forgive Her?, she seemed to vanish. Could it have been because — as evinced by Second Stage’s smart, acid-tongued revival of Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw — her plays are deeply, unnervingly not nice?
“Love is a happy by-product of use”; “Goodness and incompetence too often go hand-in-hand in men”; “I would like you to try harder the next time you attempt suicide.” That’s just a smattering of how the characters in Becky Shaw talk to each other — and, with the possible exception of the last statement, this is the more mild stuff. The world of Gionfriddo’s play is built on transaction and manipulation. Problems of intimacy are barely disguised disputes over power, victim and villain are front and back of the same mask, and money is always in the picture. Max (Alden Ehrenreich) has compensated for an unstable childhood by learning how to accumulate and control money: Adopted away from his own profligate father by the wealthy Slater family, he’s grown up a perpetual outsider, a keen observer of the rules and an unrepentant player of the game. “I know that look…” his adoptive mother, Susan (Linda Emond, swathed in dominance and condescension as if it’s Chanel), tells him in the play’s first scene. “That is the look you get when my family’s stupidity offers you a foothold to gain power.”
If Susan is devoid of tact and warmth, she’s also free from cant, which is why the play can only deploy her in its first and last scenes. In between, its younger, less fully hardened characters get sucked into the quicksand of softer concerns. Attraction, shame, responsibility, goodness, love: Susan could wither them all with a glance. Max wants to think he can, but Becky Shaw — the play and the character — is constructed to expose his vulnerability, to hook it and rip it from the depths like a mud-dwelling fish left gasping in the sun.
It’s a dirty job, but Gionfriddo is more than up to it. And in a moment when so much theater puts on kid gloves to handle its material and its audience, it can be bracing to have a play walk right up and slap you across the face. That’s how Trip Cullman’s taut, take-no-prisoners production plays it — the pulse is allegro, the casual tone spiked with gasp-inducing wickedness. (Gionfriddo has also written plenty of TV, and the devilish, you-can’t-say-that humor of Becky Shaw prefigures shows like Succession by more than a decade.) Then there’s the murky void of David Zinn’s set, which strands the characters up until the final scene in New England apartments and hotel rooms rendered entirely in black. As they bicker and negotiate, cling to and repulse each other, their bodies are dwarfed by chilly void. When an airy Southern sitting room, all white walls and gauzy curtains and gilt furniture, is at last revealed, we’re wise to its deceit: It doesn’t matter how their space is decorated — these people are trapped somewhere very dark.
These people are Max, his quasi-sister Suzanna (Lauren Patten), her husband Andrew (Patrick Ball), and the spark to the play’s fuse, Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer). “She’s … sorta delicate,” Andrew tells Suzanna as they prepare to send Max off on a blind date with this sort-of-friend from Andrew’s new temp job. What that’s code for — and what’s piquing Andrew’s caretaker tendencies along with his pheromones — is a certain kind of big-eyed helplessness. (“He hears, ‘I want to hurt myself’ like a fucking mating call,” Max snarls to Suzanna about the man she married.) But what’s underneath Becky’s skittish, self-effacing demeanor and cheap, too-pink dress is something else entirely — a kind of chemical ingredient that gradually turns the unstable compound of Max, Suzanna, and Andrew into a full-blown combustion.
To be fair to Becky, she does have a little help: She and Max are held up at gunpoint on that very bad date. Gionfriddo knows better than to show us the moment — it doesn’t matter in itself. What matters is the friction generated when Max wants to let go (“Fuck the robbery,” he says, “It’s a nonevent and I’m over it”) and Becky, ever more manipulatively, wants to hang on. There’s class tension thickening the air, too. Becky has no savings, no family, no insurance, no cell phone, and Max treats this kind of apparent failure in the face of life’s punches with barefaced disdain. He’s caught off guard every time Becky reveals her intelligence, which he would never acknowledge is like his own: the shrewd, watchful variety developed not by predators but by prey.
If the foundation of a life is transaction, then threat is always in the air. Gionfriddo begins Becky Shaw with Suzanna slumped on a hotel bed in a black dress watching grisly true crime TV. “It soothes me,” she tells Max when he takes the remote. Later the pair debate watching porn together but can’t agree over the ethical implications: “Fine,” says Max. “How about horror?” The line between desire and violence already feels perilously thin. It’s rendered lurid later on when Susan indifferently drops to her daughter that Max has always “lied and manipulated to foster your dependence … He knew you couldn’t handle those movies … He showed you those vile, horrible movies until you were afraid to sleep alone … He hobbled you so you couldn’t stray.”
The sound of a collective sucking in of breath is a regular occurrence during Becky Shaw. It’s a play of barbed wire and paper cuts, with salt ready for every nick and slice. What it’s not, though, to its credit, is a participant in Max and Suzanna’s favorite genres. Gionfriddo builds in plenty of shadowy space for us to fear the worst — the psychological or literal carnage that could result from the scenario she’s configured — but she’s too interested in nuance to turn her characters into all-out monsters or feed them into a wood chipper. It’s part of what makes the show so potentially rich for actors: In the end, the fangs and claws and abhorrent posturing are all so much animal behavior, the best defense that these small creatures can mount against their own mortal terror of getting hurt.
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.
Becky Shaw is at the Helen Hayes Theater.
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