Seventeen years after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Gina Gionfriddo’s dark, sometimes giddy comedy Becky Shaw finally arrives on Broadway, and noting that it was worth the wait is an understatement none of its brutally honest anti-heroes would make. And if the nearly two-decades-in-the-making arrival meant we had to wait for this excellent cast to come together, all the better.
Directed by Trip Cullman with an unerring aim for the comic jugular and a perfect feel for the foreboding, Becky Sharp stars Alden Ehrenreich (Weapons) and Patrick Ball (The Pitt), both making their Broadway debuts, Madeline Brewer (You), Linda Emond (Death of a Salesman, The Gilded Age) and Lauren Patten (Jagged Little Pill). Loosely inspired by Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Gionfriddo’s play is needle-sharp in its comic pokings and emotional proddings of people who wouldn’t recognize their own motivations if their lives depended on it. And maybe their lives, or at the very least their happiness, are exactly what’s at stake.
Actually, a couple characters know their motivations all too well, but more of them later.
The Second Stage Theater production opens tonight at Broadway’s Hayes Theatre and the premise is simple and time-tested, deceptively so. A blind date goes wrong, with reverberations for anyone in emotional proximity. We first meet Suzanna (Patten) and her sorta brother Max (Ehrenreich) when the latter visits the hotel room of the former to insist she get out of her grief bed (she’s still mourning the death, four months prior, of her father) to deal with some crucial family financial issues.
Max, cynical, caustic and, we sense fairly early on, entirely smitten by this sad woman with whom he grew up (Suzanna’s toxic parents raised Max after he lost his mother at age 10), is trying to convince the 30something Suzanna that she has to pull herself together to reign in the spendthrift indulgences of mother Susan (Emond), a high-living sort whose longtime battle with multiple sclerosis has left her with little patience for anything or anyone that doesn’t meet her immediate demands for a comfortable existence, if not exactly a happy life. Her latest acquisition: A grifting (offstage) gigolo.
As emotionally ruthless as her daughter is over-sensitive, Susan has no qualms about reminding the oddly loyal Max that he’ll never be anything more than a guest in her well-appointed house, or that Suzanna was destined since childhood to turn out the emotional wreak on view today.
Madeline Brewer and Patrick Ball
Marc J. Franklin
Little stage time has passed before Becky Shaw takes the first of its many turns: As money-manager Max tries to talk some financial sense into Suzanna, the two give in to a passionate kiss that we, the audience, sense has been a long time coming. Within seconds of stage time, a year passes and both characters have seemingly moved on, the kiss little more than a blip in their lives. At least, on the surface.
Sex, they tell themselves, “doesn’t have to change anything.” Right.
In the (offstage) year that follows the kiss, Suzanna has married Andrew (Ball), a nice guy she met on a ski trip who is as emotionally available and vulnerable as Max is sardonic and brutal. When the seemingly happy couple endeavor to play matchmaker for Max and Andrew’s co-worker, a young woman named Becky Sharp (Brewer), the decision will have lasting and devastating reverberations for all concerned.
Becky, you see, is not the carefree waif she might seem at first glance. She’s made a mess of her life – she’s broke, works as a temp, has alienated family and friends and has failed to see anything through to completion. The shark-like Max sees immediately that she is, as he would say, beneath him, financially, intellectually and class-wise. The two have barely met when he compares her loud, frilly dress to a birthday cake.
Brewer, memorable from The Handmaid’s Tale, initially gives Becky a sort of fragile, in-need-of-protection aura, a welcome respite from the casual cruelty and sophisticated bite of the repartee in which Max and even Suzanna engage. When Suzanna, a fledgling psychologist, tells, at Max’s urging, a mocking anecdote about one of her young clients, neither Becky nor the sensitive Andrew get the laugh. If the audience was playing matchmaker, we’d certainly pair the two nice ones and leave the other two to their own devices.
Ah, but then Becky Shaw, in the final seconds of the first act, let’s us in, just barely, on a little secret as Becky and Max are about to head off alone on their blind date (they leave Suzanna and Andrew behind to deal with mom Susan’s latest crisis). When the blind daters are about to strike out on their own, it’s Becky we fear might be the endangered red riding hood, about to be eaten by Max’s big bad wolf. Until, that is, she says, with her face to the audience and some odd glint in her eye, “I’m going to have fun.”
Becky, we learn in that moment, is no naif. She might not be looking for her very own baby reindeer, but she’ll grab it if it happens by. And it does.
The chain reaction of events sparked by that blind date – something bad happens, and its not what we might have feared – will strain the relationships of all concerned, in some cases to the breaking point and beyond. Becky Sharp wants us (and its characters) to examine motivations in how and whom we love: Is Max, with all his self-protection and cynicism, any more lethal than the seemingly selfless and generous nice-guy Andrew, whose savior impulses inevitably backfire and prove no less damaging than any of Max’s schemes? Is Suzanna’s gloomy neediness all that different from Becky’s gold-digging manipulations?
Lauren Patten and Linda Emond
Marc J. Franklin
But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. The answers to those questions are more complicated than we might presume, and Gionfriddo has no intention of letting anyone, on stage or not, off the hook. Unlikely connections are made, emotional and otherwise, between characters – the snooty Susan and the déclassé Becky prove to be two sides of a very sharp-edged coin – and tidy judgements are nowhere to be found.
Indeed, the only black-and-white to be found here is on David Zinn’s thought-provoking set, which washes the abodes of the younger characters in funereal black right down to Suzanna’s hotel bed. When the stage revolves late in the play to display Susan’s opulent digs the pale shades of whites and golds almost hurt our eyes. And it’s there, in the glare, that truths at long last come to the fore, however grudgingly and painfully and very often with a guilt-inducing guffaw. (Kaye Voyce’s character-defining costumes, and Stacey Derosier’s dime-turning lighting design are equally telling).
As good as Cullman’s direction here is, it’s matched beat by beat by a no-weak-link cast. Ehrenreich plays against his usual good-guy screen image to present a corrosive personality that scorches even those he loves (they’re few and far between, maybe even unique, but still). His Max would be right at home in those old Whit Stillman films about toxic Ivy Leaguers. The fact that we ultimately have any sympathy at all for Max – and strangely enough, we do – can be chalked up to a performance that matches the exquisite writing.
Ehrenreich’s co-stars accomplish similar feats. Ball, so good as the recovering addict on The Pitt, reveals his character’s self-interests, disguised always as benevolence, with great subtlety, and Patten, a scene-stealer some years back in Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill, finds the sweet spot between manipulator and manipulated here, her Suzanna forever getting in her own way.
Emond, one of the stage’s great secret weapons, graces this production with a presence that’s both hysterically funny and absolutely lethal. Her aging, ailing, unfailingly elegant Susan is, in the end, no less noxious than her damaged faux-son Max, but her malignant put-downs are delivered with a refinement that can make them seem a genuine favor.
Then there’s the title character, who at first impression could be a helpless goldfish just waiting for any one of these alley cats to knock over her bowl and swallow her tail and all. But we, in the audience, can’t forgot that conspiratorial grin she flashed at the end of Act I, and before all is said and done she’ll wreak havoc not even the misanthropic Max could have entirely foreseen. One of this play’s many delights arrives when down-market, undereducated Becky comes face-to-face with the aristocratic Susan, their similarities soon as peculiar and glaring as their differences.
All concerned – writer, director and cast – will, ultimately, refuse to give up these characters’ games easily, with Becky Shaw building to a climax that will leave audiences debating and interpreting. You might even feel actual sympathy for some of the least likely, maybe even least deserving, graspers brought to vivid life here. We wish them luck, and we wish them to stay well clear of our paths.
Title: Becky Shaw
Venue: Broadway’s Hayes Theater
Written By: Gina Gionfriddo
Directed By: Trip Cullman
Cast: Patrick Ball, Madeline Brewer, Alden Ehrenreich, Linda Emond, Lauren Patten
Running Time: 2 hr 15 min (including intermission)
