Becky Shaw<\/a>,<\/em> 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\u2014a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama\u2014is now playing on Broadway, at Second Stage\u2019s Helen Hayes Theatre. The limited-run revival, directed by Trip Cullman, opened to raves on April 6.<\/p>\nThe 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\u2014including Andrew\u2019s wife, Suzanna (Lauren Patten), and Suzanna\u2019s mother, Susan (Linda Edmond)\u2014pays the price.<\/p>\n
Aspects of Becky Shaw<\/em> were loosely inspired by William Makepeace Thackeray\u2019s Vanity Fair,<\/em> in which another character named Becky\u2014this one with the surname Sharp\u2014is \u201csuper, super out there and blunt about trying to marry into a higher class,\u201d Gionfriddo says. She was interested in what it would mean for a 21st-century woman to lead with similarly mercenary goals.<\/p>\nBetween 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?<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\nPatrick Ball and Lauren Patten in Becky Shaw<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/span>Marc J. Franklin<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\nGionfriddo, who is often staffed on crime-related television series in Los Angeles\u2014her writing credits include shows across the Law & Order<\/em> universe, FBI: Most Wanted,<\/em> and House of Cards<\/em>\u2014happened to be at home on the Upper West Side when Becky Shaw<\/em> went into production. The coincidence allowed her to be \u201cvery, very involved,\u201d attending the majority of the three weeks of rehearsals and approving casting decisions.<\/p>\n\u201c[Casting] was an interesting process because actors doing this play really have to be okay not being liked,\u201d muses Gionfriddo. \u201cAnd there certainly were actors who read the script who were not okay with that.\u201d There was also the question of how theatergoers would respond to some of the show\u2019s more daring jokes. \u201cI think we were all a bit worried about audiences maybe recoiling from the nastiness of some of the humor,\u201d she notes, \u201cand that hasn\u2019t proven to be the case, which is a great relief.\u201d It could be that with so much else going on in the world right now, a bit of coarseness just doesn\u2019t seem like a big deal. That, or Becky Shaw<\/em> is just really fucking funny.<\/p>\n\n
\n<\/p>\nPlaywright Gina Gionfriddo<\/p>\n
<\/span>Photo: Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nWhile Gionfriddo\u2019s most renowned plays, including After Ashley<\/em> and Rapture, Blister, Burn,<\/em> have been heralded as dark comedies, she didn\u2019t always identify as a humorist. \u201cI don\u2019t 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.\u201d Much of her inspiration comes from gay playwrights who lived through the AIDS crisis. \u201cI just love that their humor was so dark\u2026I think there is a certain kind of humorist I respond to who is sort of cracking jokes to keep despair at bay.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019m terrible,\u201d says playwright Gina Gionfriddo. \u201cI 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.\u201d It may not always land with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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