Play by Gina Gionfriddo
Directed by Peter DuBois
With Maureen Anderman, Seth Fisher, Wendy Hoopes, Eli James, Keira Naughton
Huntington Theatre Company
at Boston University Theatre, Boston, MA
What a wonderful comedy of terrible, caustic manners this is. The stage of the Boston University Theatre comes bitterly alive under the auspices of this tight and entertaining production by the Huntington Theatre Company.
Gina Gionfriddo’s play is so dense with one liners that I was at first inclined to grimace as I macheted my way through the thick brush of the attempted entertainment. In short order, I just could not resist laughing out loud at an accelerating percentage of the barbs until I found I was truly enjoying the onslaught. It is devilishly pleasing to find oneself viscerally relishing lines that, using one’s better judgment, one is at first inclined to scorn. But Gionfriddo’s great trick- and she does it marvelously well – is to lather it on insistently, and repugnantly, while building and embellishing an aesthetically charming edifice.
In this tragicomic group portrait, it is hard to tell, for most of the duration, why the play is named after Becky Shaw until the denouement gives just enough explanation. It appears that the name “Becky Shaw” is intentionally derived from the protagonist Becky Sharp of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. A program note suggests this association. And when one goes back to view the subtitle of Vanity Fair – A Novel Without A Hero – the relationship to Becky Shaw becomes clear. This is a play about vulnerability, manipulation and adaptation, and it evolves its intellectual muscle far more from Darwinian natural selection than from anything resembling the golden rule. In Freudian terms: cook up a mess of aggressive instincts, cut out the superego, boil off the ego, et voila!
In this battle of wits, wills and whims fought on multiple fronts, the psychological battering gains depth as it moves forward. Actually, I don’t know if I would say it gains depth, but it gains momentum and force, like a snowball pronged with icicles rolling down a steep hill. One wonders, in the end, whether this snowball hits its intended target, or whether it just self-destructs. In drama, even a comic one, when the result avoids anything resembling resolution, such universal cynicism tends to fragment the mass and quickly melt away the pieces. But, seen slightly differently, as a dramatic comedy in which dissolution is the guiding force, its mutual destructiveness, and self-imposed destruction, simply add to the distillation and sublimation of the humor. Becky Shaw is, I think, best seen in this way, by enjoying the declicacies of the meal, but not expecting necessarily to get all one’s recommended daily allowances of vitamins and minerals from it.
Putatively, the drama within this comedy unfolds as a result of a blind date, which is what the play’s marketing riffs tell us to expect. In fact, we need to march through the setup of the whole first act to get a sense of what the fodder stuffed into the cannon of this date really is. But in this march – at first dutiful, then pleasant, then rollicking – the surprises come fast and furious. As we move forward through this well constructed play, the landscape opens and the abundance of dramatic turns, constantly interleaved with the acerbic llines in rapid succession, keep us on our toes.
Seth Fisher, as Max, one of the participants in the blind date, upholds brilliantly the role of cynical high priest. There is a flavoring of the wonderfully brash Ricky Roma character from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (which Joe Mantegna pulled off beautifully in the Boston production years ago) – unrelenting in its distance from anything gentle and reflective. But here, additionally, Max’s character provides an acidic directness. Fisher does a good job of spitting his lines harshly and pointedly. When, in setting up the fateful date, Suzanna (played nicely by Keira Naughton) tells Max that Becky does not have a cell phone, he recoils without misssing a beat: What, is she Amish? It brought down the house.
Maureen Anderman (Susan) brings new meaning to the term sang-froid in her depiction of the mother figure and relentlessly unties the knots of any remnants of maternity that dangle. Eli James is a capable mixture of affable and witless as Andrew, the sensitive new age guy (as the songwriter, Christine Lavin, put it years ago). He looks like a narrower, tie-dyed version of Will Ferrell in his best dumb and dumber form. It’s a great role – the generous, giving, egalitarian and clueless male from the counter-cultural backcountry having to face, in a duel, the dark knight from the world of fast talking, hard driving, heartbreaking, urban streetfighters.
But, really, the duels are fought in all the unexpected places in the end and the author does a great job of keeping one guessing about whose sword is the poisoned one. The two younger women – Wendy Hoopes (Becky Shaw) and Keira Naughton (Suzanna) do a good job of providing the mortar of the play. Their parts are the ones that keep the framework together – less verbally decorative, but essential to the dramatic infrastructure. In closing, Gionfriddo takes a crowbar and peels away the surfaces, and it is here where the protagonist’s mettle is displayed and the architecture of the weaponry becomes clear.
Peter DuBois does an admirable job of keeping the relentlessness interesting and the wits sharpened while creating openings for the punch lines of psychological subtext which rise up from the acidic banter as the most significant elements.
It is nice to see such spice, so delectably rendered, on the Huntington Theatre Company’s stage. Sometimes the offerings of the past have emphasized starch rather than spice, and it is good to see how the new chefs are modifying older recipes to retain the basic character in the midst of invention. The sturdiness of the dishes remains, but the added flavors rise up and catch one in a startling, and very appealing, way. It’s the second great play of the season I have seen at the Huntington Theatre Company. Arthur Miller’s tragedy, All My Sons, which I saw in January, was a truly exquisite production, and Becky Shaw, though an entirely different kind of play, follows it in less grand, but in casual and respectably contemporary, style.
– BADMan
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