Brian Avers is Max and Angela Goethals is Becky Shaw in Becky Shaw.

GREAT (DATE) EXPECTATIONS

by Kelly L. Miller

The title character of Gina Gionfriddo’s modern comedy of manners, Becky Shaw, doesn’t appear until forty minutes into the play, when newlyweds Suzanna and Andrew set her up on a blind date with Suzanna’s acerbic, adopted-brother Max. That night — and their blind date — begin full of possibility, but the introduction of Becky Shaw will disrupt all of their lives and even affect the complicated relationship between Suzanna and her domineering mother Susan, who’s recently taken up with a much younger man after the death of her husband.

In Becky Shaw, Gionfriddo uses complex characterization and sharp-edged humor to examine issues of class, money, morality, love and social ambition in modern America, as filtered through a set-up of non-equals. Explaining to Suzanna why he’s hesitant to return Becky’s calls after their date, Max (a well-heeled money manager) lists her shortcomings: “She’s a thirty-five-year-old office temp with no money, no friends, no relationship, no family…Romantic relationships are the pairing of equals!  That woman is not my equal!”

Gina Gionfriddo

Gionfriddo’s title character was inspired by another famous social climber:  Becky Sharp of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In The New York Times, the playwright discussed how many women — from the 19th-century literary tradition through today — are vilified and punished for their social ambition. “There (was) a need for women to be put in their place…People like Becky Sharp and Hedda Gabler (were) boldly out there, aggressively trying to get stuff,” Gionfriddo said, “Today they would have been Anna Wintour.”  She posits, even now: “I do think we recoil from people who do that.”  But Becky Shaw is not the villain of the play. Gionfriddo says, “I wanted my Becky to be a figure who is out of her class and trying to break in…I didn’t want her to be a viper, just someone who at 35 made a lot of mistakes and didn’t have many options.”

There are no absolute heroes or villains in Becky Shaw, by design. Just men and women dealing with the everyday, universal complexities of love and compatibility, money and class. In fact, when the play first premiered in the 2008 Humana Festival — lauded by The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as “suspenseful, witty and infused with an unsettling sense of the potential for psychic disaster inherent in almost any close relationship” — it was a veritable dramatic Rorschach test of morality for audiences. According to Gionfriddo, viewers' past romantic history often influenced which characters they perceived as good or bad. Was Becky a dim-witted victim of circumstance or a cunning manipulator? (Or, perhaps, a little of both?)  Was Max brutally honest out of necessity or cruelty?

The play is “a journey of moral discovery,” Gionfriddo has said, and the characters are “people who are wrestling with their best and worst selves, and who keep lapsing into something they don’t want to be.”

With Becky Shaw, Gionfriddo is reflecting the challenges and contradictions of daily life and love on stage.  She invites us join her and her characters on the same slippery journey of moral discovery we experience each and every day, in which we all struggle to be our better selves — and find love and acceptance along the way.

The Playwright and Players of Becky Shaw THE CAST:  (l. to r.) Tessa Auberjonois, Brian Avers, Barbara Tarbuck, Angela Goethals and Graham Michael Hamilton. When Gina Gionfriddo’s new play premiered at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it “an absorbing comedy-drama [which]…marks an impressive stride for a writer with a saw-toothed wit and a seductive interest in exploring the rewards and responsibilities of emotional interdependence.” An accomplished playwright with an MFA in playwriting from Brown University, Ms. Gionfriddo has also worked as a writer and producer for television, including "Law & Order," "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," "Cold Case" and HBO's new "Boardwalk Empire." She has received numerous awards for her plays, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Becky Shaw and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for best English-language play by a woman for her play U.S. Drag. Her other plays include After Ashley, Guinevere, America’s Got Tragedy, Squalor and Safe. Director Pam MacKinnon (a longtime Gionfriddo collaborator) returns to SCR to direct Becky Shaw, with an exceptional cast including Tessa Auberjonois (Crimes of the Heart, Everett Beekin) as Suzanna, SCR newcomer Brian Avers (NCIS: Los Angeles, King Lear at the Public Theatre) as Max, Angela Goethals (Nothing Sacred) as Becky Shaw, Graham Michael Hamilton (Saturn Returns, Hamlet) as Andrew and Barbara Tarbuck (Beginning of August, Blue Window) as Susan. The creative team includes Daniel Ostling (sets), Sarah Ryung Clement (costumes), Lap Chi Chu (lighting), and Michael K. Hooker (original music/sound design).

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