“I’m terrible,” says playwright Gina Gionfriddo. “I made a joke [to my daughter] once about leaving the door open and letting the murderers come in and kill us all. I have to watch it.”
It may not always land with her family, but that barbed sense of humor is what powers Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, an acid-tongued comedy about a bad blind date that quickly devolves into unchecked pandemonium. Eighteen years after premiering at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the show—a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama—is now playing on Broadway, at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theatre. The limited-run revival, directed by Trip Cullman, opened to raves on April 6.
The action hinges on the titular Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer), a desperate yet shrewd 35-year-old woman whose life has unraveled due to a slew of disastrous romances. Her solution? Marrying up. As she tries to course-correct by seducing the snarky money manager Max (Alden Ehrenreich), whom her coworker Andrew (Patrick Ball) misguidedly set her up with, everyone in her vicinity—including Andrew’s wife, Suzanna (Lauren Patten), and Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Linda Emond)—pays the price.
Aspects of Becky Shaw were loosely inspired by William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in which another character named Becky—this one with the surname Sharp—is “super, super out there and blunt about trying to marry into a higher class,” Gionfriddo says. She was interested in what it would mean for a 21st-century woman to lead with similarly mercenary goals.
Between its scrutiny of hypergamy and discussions of ex-baristas with savior complexes, narcissistic mothers, mail fraud, coitus between quasi-siblings, and robbery at gunpoint, the play asks knotty, arduous questions: What does it mean to lead a virtuous life? Is it possible to ever really know the people we love? What do we owe strangers?
Gionfriddo, who is often staffed on crime-related television series in Los Angeles—her writing credits include shows across the Law & Order universe, FBI: Most Wanted, and House of Cards—happened to be at home on the Upper West Side when Becky Shaw went into production. The coincidence allowed her to be “very, very involved,” attending the majority of the three weeks of rehearsals and approving casting decisions.
“[Casting] was an interesting process because actors doing this play really have to be okay not being liked,” muses Gionfriddo. “And there certainly were actors who read the script who were not okay with that.” There was also the question of how theatergoers would respond to some of the show’s more daring jokes. “I think we were all a bit worried about audiences maybe recoiling from the nastiness of some of the humor,” she notes, “and that hasn’t proven to be the case, which is a great relief.” It could be that with so much else going on in the world right now, a bit of coarseness just doesn’t seem like a big deal. That, or Becky Shaw is just really fucking funny.
While Gionfriddo’s most renowned plays, including After Ashley and Rapture, Blister, Burn, have been heralded as dark comedies, she didn’t always identify as a humorist. “I don’t think I would ever have said I was a comic writer, that I was funny, until college, which is when things sort of got hard for me.” Much of her inspiration comes from gay playwrights who lived through the AIDS crisis. “I just love that their humor was so dark…I think there is a certain kind of humorist I respond to who is sort of cracking jokes to keep despair at bay.”
Pain is also a recurring topic in Becky Shaw. At one point, Suzanna berates Max for tuning out other people’s suffering when it suits him. “Unless you’re Gandhi or Jesus, you have a limited sphere of responsibility,” Max rebuts. “You have a plot of land and the definition of a moral life is tending that plot of land.”
While Gionfriddo can easily list those who occupy her own plot of land—“obviously first my child, then my brother, my close friends”—the question of how much she owes the rest of the world still haunts her. When Becky Shaw premiered in 2008, the Iraq War was the hot-button issue that dominated moral arguments. Today, we don’t have to look far for an equivalent. “There’s a lot of dialogue [asking] how are we all going about our lives when we’re threatening to decimate Iran? And there is a part of me that, like Max, is sort of like, I have a kid to raise. I need to pay my mortgage….And what would I do anyway? But the other side of that is nothing changes if we all take that attitude.”
What do we owe strangers? What makes someone “good”? Gionfriddo doesn’t pretend to have the answers. “You may have been very victimized in your life; you may be a complete con artist,” Susan tells Becky in the final scene. “I don’t know. My sense is you fall somewhere in the middle.”
Because Becky Shaw resides in this murky, often slightly icky zone of moral ambiguity, a neat ending would ring false. Instead, the characters arrive onstage, ask questions, present their contradictory opinions, make choices, and argue some more before the stage goes dark. At that point, the scripted drama may be over, but it seems more likely than not that Becky, Max, Suzanna, Andrew, and Susan are still out there making questionable decisions, falling in love, accidentally inflicting damage, and ultimately continuing on.