'Becky Shaw' Broadway review — no one holds back in this pitch-black relationship comedy

Read our review of Becky Shaw on Broadway, Gina Gionfriddo's 2009 Pulitzer Prize-nominated dark comedy play now running at Second Stage Theater's Hayes Theater.

When Suzanna (Lauren Patten) tells her adoptive brother Max (Alden Ehrenreich) she is in therapy in the opening scene of Becky Shaw, he says, with growling sanctimony, “That’s not action, that’s wallowing.”

Though not a biological family member, Max is at ease telling his "relatives," particularly Suzanna, how to be, and she readily accepts. Their cloying closeness as sort-of siblings — the two snuggle up to watch a horror movie in bed after Max tells Suzanna to turn off a true crime show — is colored by a similar, stormy friction that can be traced back to Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Linda Emond): tart, avoidant, and strikingly blunt. Her qualities have split between her children: She fights often with Suzanna, who is at once protective and yet fuels her mother’s antagonistic fires with verbal kerosene of her own, armed with broad frameworks she’s learned from her psychology PhD program. Max is responsible for getting down to business, but he’s as mercenary as they come, any kind of tenderness or empathy utterly foreign to him. After the death of the family’s patriarch, their relationships start to unravel, with a blind date for Max (Madeline Brewer as the title character) arriving as a grenade-like catalyst for the process.

Gina Gionfriddo’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist Becky Shaw has a brashness that feels at once of its time and strangely contemporary. Suzanna’s husband Andrew (Patrick Ball), Max's foil in his desperate kindness and feminist rhetoric, is reminiscent of a semi-bygone archetype of the well-meaning male feminist best embodied by actor Matt McGorry’s public persona in the 2010s — but then again, they're still around, and we just call them “soyboys” now. Max, who callously disposes of other people’s pain next to his own ego, is just a looksmaxxer by another name. And Suzanna’s meddling in her mother’s life, her sometimes arbitrary adherence to certain boundaries, and her belief in her own goodness seems sprung from a era of emotional intelligence fostered on social media, which is now the norm.

Each character appears to be attached to the notion of their own righteousness. They snipe at one another using Gionfriddo’s steel-tipped bullets of dialogue, each time aiming for the jugular. It is the insecure, needy, ne’er-do-well Becky who is the show’s dramaturgical MacGuffin, the convenient plot point to which all other characters react and are changed by. This unfortunately leaves Becky more richly written in theory than in actuality, though Brewer plays the character with a winning brittleness that, once it snaps, cleverly punctures some of the other characters’ bubbles.

There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-farce full of caricatures and not people. Thus, Max’s more reactionary points and Susan’s nihilism dilute the clarity of the ideas the show gestures toward: the compromise and ignorance necessary for love to function, the importance of incorporating others' pain into your existence, the way power is wielded between loved ones, the weakening of a generation by way of therapy talk. Though 150 minutes worth of poison-dart dialogue is fun to watch, by the end of the show, I couldn’t figure out what it was aiming for.

Becky Shaw summary

After the death of Suzanna's father, her relationship with her adoptive brother Max reaches a head when it’s revealed that the patriarch squandered the family’s money. Suzanna and Max are locked in a codependent dynamic, the latter monitoring Suzanna’s financial and emotional decisions where her avoidant, multiple sclerosis-afflicted mother won't.

When she attempts to set Max up on a blind date with her husband Andrew's coworker, the titular Becky Shaw, Max and Suzanna have to come to terms with the fractious, overbearing nature of their relationship while everyone else's dynamics get rocked as well.

What to expect at Becky Shaw

Scenic designer David Zinn's spare, mostly matte black set for Becky Shaw seemingly reflects a kind of emptiness about the character’s lives. The back wall slants across the stage with its closest edge on stage right, with three doors along it and through which characters enter and exit. It slightly recalls a meme of death knocking on doors, with everyone's circular arguments as their imagined purgatory.

What audiences are saying about Becky Shaw

Becky Shaw has an 87% audience approval rating on the review aggregator Show-Score, averaged from 150 mostly positive reviews from theatregoers at the time of writing.

• “It is an entertaining play about the interaction among young people. It is a comedy with a message.” - Show-Score user Joan D
• “The show was fine but didn’t stay with me. It’s weird that they’re promoting the guy from The Pitt and the girl from Handmaid’s Tale as the two stars, as they’re actually the two supporting characters. The actor playing Max is fantastic. Lauren Patten was less believable. I just ended up not really understanding what the point of the show was, and I didn’t find it hilarious as some did.” - Show-Score user Verified A
• “BECKY SHAW provided the audience with countless opportunities to laugh together. Given the current state of the world, moments for laughter – surrounded by other laughters – felt terrific.” - Anonymous Show-Score user

Read more audience reviews of Becky Shaw on Show-Score.

Who should see Becky Shaw

• Playwright Gina Gionfriddo, a two time Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist for this and Rapture, Blister, Burn, has also made a successful career writing for television shows like Law & Order, Cold Case, and The Alienist. Seeing her interest in power and gender on stage will be of interest to fans of those TV shows.
• While Madeline Brewer has gained fame on shows like The Handmaid's Tale and You, she’s a particularly adroit stage performer, giving her character grace and groundedness even at her ugliest moments.
• Alden Ehrenreich is a commanding stage presence, wolfish and hungry to savor each line of darkly funny dialogue as a deeply damaged man who displays those scars.

Learn more about Becky Shaw on Broadway

Though Trip Cullman hasn’t figured out what Becky Shaw is about, and his semi-screwball direction tends to risk making his characters cartoonish, a capable cast keeps the show entertaining if not substantial.

Learn more and get Becky Shaw tickets on New York Theatre Guide. Becky Shaw is at the Hayes Theater through June 14.

Photo credit: Becky Shaw on Broadway. (Photos by Marc J. Franklin)