silverguide.site –

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable selling point for a New York play than a bad date. The humiliation, disappointment, confusion and hilarity of a date gone awry is an evergreen anecdote, the grist for good gossip and perhaps even better comedy. Such is the pitch of Becky Shaw, Second Stage Theater’s new production of Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 play, which promises a blind date that, of course, “spirals spectacularly off the rails”. Even nearly 20 years later, one person’s bad date is another’s great theater, though the inciting incident for this taut and frequently funny play’s interpersonal disaster is less romantic horror than four cases of festering emotional trauma. It makes for a strange brew of narcissism, cynicism and manipulation which still somehow, despite its poison, manages to cast a nostalgic glow on the pre-smartphone dating era.

Director Trip Cullman wisely decided against updating the original play’s text for its Broadway debut this season. Instead, the onetime Pulitzer finalist exists, for better and for worse, as a relic of a not-so-distant but totally foreign time to the modern dater. We transport to 2007, an era of flip phones and nude patent leather heels (period-lite costumes by Kaye Voyce), a time when you could plausibly send someone to physically track down the person who has not texted you back. The central foursome in this two-act production, now at the Hayes Theater, may spout dated references to the Green party and the Iraq war, but their archetypes are evergreen: the well-meaning but self-absorbed intellectual, the self-deflecting misanthrope, the self-affirming do-gooder and, last not but least, the perpetual victim.

How these types collide is, like the family dynamics at play, a bit convoluted. We first meet Suzanna (Lauren Patten, a Tony winner for Jagged Little Pill), a psychology grad student, in a sterile New York hotel room hours after her father’s funeral. Though she is 35, she’s handling the loss, and the presence of her mother’s new boyfriend, like a child, especially in the presence of her older pseudo-brother Max (Oppenheimer’s Alden Ehrenreich). A modern orphan – dead mother, white-collar criminal father – whom her parents informally adopted when he was 10, Max is a believable finance bro sheathed in a gleaming armor of cynicism who bluntly informs Suzanna and her disabled mother (a delightfully imperious Linda Emond) that their finances are a mess. Also, her late father was probably gay (like I said, there are some dated provocations).

Max and Suzanna’s semi-incestuous bond crackles and snaps on stage but, eight months and one scene later, she’s married to Andrew (The Pitt’s Patrick Ball), a very “indie rock” (Max’s words) aspiring writer. The fresh couple are making it work in Providence, on Max’s financial advice. As a thank you, or a favor, or a hail Mary, they ill-advisedly propose a double date with Max and Andrew’s temp co-worker, Becky (Madeline Brewer), a thirtysomething college dropout with no car and seemingly a lot of baggage. This is essentially the first half of the show: meticulous, refreshingly specific and razor-sharp in its set up, padding the room for Becky’s inauspicious entry. (Gianfriddo loosely based the character on Rebecca “Becky” Sharp, the wily yet penniless young woman from William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847-48 novel Vanity Fair). “You look like a birthday cake,” Max derisively greets her, a sign of bitterness to come. Such aspersions pleasantly shock, for this tangle of attractions – Max to Becky’s surprising sharpness, Andrew to her woundedness, Suzanna to Max’s acidity – are, at least in the first act, electric.

That the show can’t sustain this charge through its erratic second act is more a book issue than performance. The aftermath of Becky and Max’s (unseen) date are downstream conversations between characters that reveal the lopsidedness of their constitutions. Ironically, the play’s namesake, played by Brewer with shades of wild desperation, feels the least grounded: a plot device dressed up as a confection whose big reveal – let’s say a complicated history with Black men – feels both dated and contrived, the bite of Halloween teeth where there could be fangs. Max, the most transparently slimy one of the group, is also the most convincing. Ehrenreich is so good at playing this type of obviously overcompensating, moneyed cad (please see Chloe Domont’s 2023 film Fair Play), so good at contemptuously delivering the line “that woman” in a way that sends chills down your spine, that I missed anytime he was offstage.

All return, at least, for a final reputational and relational slugfest that, though it made me think (then curse myself for thinking) of the word “hysterical,” also allowed for Emond to deliver some delectable nuggets of terrible wisdom hardened by years of chronic illness into black diamonds. The real horror in Becky Shaw is not a bad date but inescapable patterns of dysfunction – just as funny, in moments, but also much, much scarier.