"Becky Shaw' at the Wilma (1st review)

We first meet the 30-somethings, Suzanna and Max, in a New York hotel room, where we find them engaged in a bitterly funny argument, ostensibly over strategic tactics for a forthcoming family financial meeting. Suzanna, a perpetual psychology student, is consumed with grief over her father's death and expecting empathy in return; Max, a coldly logical money manager, reminds Suzanna that her father has already been dead for four months and that financial contests are won not by crybabies but by "whoever has the biggest dick."

Suzanna (Danielle Skraastad) and Max (Jeremy Bobb) seem intimate in some sense, even if they're emotional opposites. But the precise nature of their relationship isn't immediately clear. Is Max her husband? Her brother? Her lover? Her financial adviser? Or just a very old friend?

As it turns out, Max might be all of the above— but such labels are irrelevant in this case, because their relationship is unique. But then, as Gina Gionfriddo reminds us in Becky Shaw, all relationships are unique. They're also susceptible to change at any moment.

Therapy session

Nor can this remarkably intelligent and moving play be easily pigeonholed as either a wicked comedy or a devastating psychodrama. Gionfriddo's concern is the process by which human relationships change people for better or worse. Whether that makes you laugh or cry depends on your individual circumstances at a given moment.

A good therapy group provides a "room of mirrors" in which we can see ourselves through others. That's essentially what Gionfriddo provides in Becky Shaw. Instead of inventing familiar stage stereotypes with whom we can identify, she has created five original and complicated characters whom we've never encountered before.

Suzanna's mother Susan, for example, is a tough old bird (played by Janis Dardaris) who has survived by rubbing everyone else's faces in their problems while resolutely refusing to confront her own; in her shrinking from intimacy she shares much in common with the hard-nosed Max, who sees everyone's problems clearly except his own. All five characters are manifestly flawed but not undeserving of our sympathy, once we learn their histories. (Susan's problems, for example, include her husband's business failure, his possible homosexuality and her own multiple sclerosis). Through this sympathy we recognize bits of ourselves in each of them. God knows I did.

Sir Lancelot's wife

The most ostensibly dramatic events in Becky Shaw occur offstage; for Gionfriddo, the compelling question is not what happened but how people recall and react to those events. In the second scene, eight months have passed and we find Suzanna newly married and living in Providence, R.I. Her younger husband, Andrew (Armando Riesco), is Max's temperamental opposite: an earnest and naÓ¯ve writer with few material prospects and a Sir Lancelot complex that compels him to save damsels in distress, like Suzanna.

Max arrives, infuriated by this turn of events— although, as we learn, he set them in motion. For their evening's reunion, Andrew arranges a date for Max with another fragile woman whom Andrew barely knows. Becky Shaw (Brooke Bloom) is a delicate leaf, a perpetual victim whose emotionally-driven decisions— she has loved not wisely but too well— have cut herself off from friends and family alike.

At first glance she seems utterly unsuited to Max: He's a bully who has everything but a heart; Becky has nothing but a heart. Their first meeting in Andrew's and Suzanna's apartment indeed seems a disaster, and their subsequent first date will seem a disaster as well. But as they depart on that date at the close of the first act, there's an almost imperceptible moment when Becky slips her arm through Max's and you find yourself thinking: Maybe these two seemingly incompatible people belong together; maybe this leaf will penetrate the barriers Max has constructed around his emotions.

Body language

It's the little gestures like this that enhance Gionfriddo's already provocative script. Under Anne Kauffman's direction, a superb cast conveys, through body language as well as dialogue, the sort of human inconsistencies that rarely emerge in a two-hour play. As portrayed by Brooke Bloom, Becky Shaw can be an insecure klutz one moment and the Sugar Plum Fairy the next; it all depends on whom and what she's relating to. At other plays, I'm often aware of the awkwardness of actors standing around on stage; not so here.

But the real star of this production is Mimi Lien's remarkable revolving set. What first greets us as an empty room is successively transformed into a hotel room, Suzanna's and Andrew's Providence apartment, Becky's flat, a Providence bar, and mother Susan's mansion in Richmond, Virginia. The set takes us into every character's home, in fact, except Max's, an astute reflection of his lack of emotional grounding.

Each time the set revolves, we see that the rooms are connected by an identical hallway. It's an apt reinforcement of Gionfriddo's point: That we're all connected, and we remake ourselves just as we refurnish our living quarters.

Risking pain

Throughout Becky Shaw, Gionfriddo stays a step ahead of her audience. We're never sure where things are going, and that too is Gionfriddo's point. You can never know when a Becky Shaw will cross your path and change your life; and Becky Shaw herself can never know when you will change hers. It's just a matter of taking the risk of exposing oneself to pain— as Becky has done too often, and as Max has taken care to avoid. "Anything that matters carries the potential for hurt," Becky reminds him.

That advice sounded familiar to me, so afterward I slipped my wedding band from my finger to re-examine the inscription inside. And there it was: "Without a hurt the heart is hollow"— the famous line from "Try to Remember," the signature song in The Fantasticks. The woman who changed my life gave me that ring at our wedding 46 years ago, long before Gina Gionfriddo was born.

It's heartening to know people can change; it's also comforting to know that some things don't.♦


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.