"Becky Shaw' at the Wilma (2nd review)

Two non-reviews of the Wilma's outstanding production of Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, culled from nearly 2,000 words of notes I jotted down while watching it:

I. I don't want "ghetto therapy"

If nothing else, Gionfriddo's play proves why a universal health care system should never include free therapy. At least not for over-educated, uber-sensitive white people who've never faced a real problem in their lives.

Consider the play's opening scene: Max tries to console Suzanna, still grieving four months after her father's death and newly upset because her mother brought her lover to a meeting about dad's estate. While Suzanna cries, Max displays tough love, drawing laughs while telling her to "Light a vanilla candle" or "Write in your dream journal" later, because now she needs to "be a big girl and fix big-girl problems," i.e., impending bankruptcy.

Later we meet the title character, an impoverished woman subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches who self-admittedly "made a mess of her life" by dropping out of Brown University (and forfeiting her Ivy League scholarship) after capitulating to her parents and putting all her eggs in the basket of one relationship. After a failed first date with Max, Becky attempts suicide (well, at least of the "I want attention" pretend sort). When Suzanna and her husband Andrew advise her to seek out the sliding scale advice of social workers, she screams, "I don't want ghetto therapy!"

Of course not. For Becky's very real problems, only the "Cadillac plan" will do.

A comfortable life space

In stark contrast to the hard-assed Max, Andrew offers women the kind of solace to suit creative class concerns that trump genuine hardship with the desire for a feeling-centered, supportive life-space. Speaking of an unseen character, Andrew remarks, "She's so much healthier now"— referring, of course, to emotional health.

Also unlike Max— a high-salaried financial advisor— Andrew is a struggling writer. For that matter, Suzanna is a grad student and Becky is an office temp. If we relied on this threesome to support a national health care system, their problems would bankrupt the nation tomorrow.

I prayed for one of these kidults to come down with cancer or some disease that would shed genuine perspective on their "feelings." As my father told me during some now-forgotten adolescent crisis of mine: "There are three big calamities in life— war, poverty and disease— and you haven't suffered any of them."

Unlike Gionfriddo's characters, Dad had endured the Great Depression, received his World War II draft notice on his 18th birthday, and suffered from a childhood malnourishment that brittled his bones and left him for life with a perpetually inconveniencing broken hip. Yet somehow, he managed to pull himself out of poverty, earn a graduate degree and raise a family— feats that Gionfriddo's three women (I'm including Andrew) can't even conceive, much less attempt.

Of course, Dad's story lacks feeling and consequently no longer makes for good drama. I wonder: If white-upper-middle creative class playwrights like Gionfriddo couldn't indulge in manufactured drama, would they have anything left to dramatize?

II. Up against Oscar Wilde

If I'd only seen Act I, I would've called Becky Shaw "the year's most charming piece of nothingness." In that spirit, I would suggest that most critics have incorrectly pegged Gionfriddo's play as a comedy of manners.

Like Oscar Wilde's plays, Becky Shaw indulges in the relationship foibles of the leisure class— that is, a class untroubled by anything but mating or family concerns (Gionfriddo even threw in the story of a foundling, reminiscent of The Importance of Being Earnest). Both filled their plays with quips. Especially in Max's lines, Gionfriddo proves a master of the epigram. Consider:

—On marriage: "Love is a happy by-product of use."

—On the aesthetic unappeal of amateur porn: "I want the "'Love Boat,' not the real boat with real lovers."

—Attitudes to life: "You would prefer a disgusting reality over a beautiful fiction."

—On the white-knighting Andrew: "He hears "'I wanna hurt myself' like a fucking mating call."

—About deceit (this from Suzanna): "Sometimes lying is the most humane thing you can do."

Any of these stands up well against Wilde's most memorable quotes:

—"I can resist everything except temptation,"

—"The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain."

—"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

The white creative class

Becky Shaw further mirrors Wilde by using a comedy to touch on a range of subjects, from the advantages of white lying to the importance of healthy finances to a virtuous life, to such questions as: Does an emotional affair really constitute an affair? And what role should intimacy play in a marriage?

But Wilde's plays— though filled with timeless advice about men, women and relationships—remain rooted in his 19th-Century world. Wilde relied on 19th-Century theater conventions that capped every question with an answer (or an epigram) and tied up the plot ends neatly by curtain.

Gionfriddo, by contrast, provides no easy solutions in Becky Shaw, and by taking us across vast stretches of time and place (from Boston and Richmond, Va.), she expands surface-level concerns to reveal lasting implications. (Here, Mimi Lien's magnificent revolving set makes its best contribution by integrating the play.)

Cheated out of a Pulitzer

Nor does Gionfriddo insert her own voice into the play in any recognizable manner. In all of Wilde's plays, one character— whether Algernon or Lord Goring— obviously sits in for the author, and forever tethers the plays to the author's distinctive wit and voice.

Gionfriddo, on the other hand, refuses to pronounce judgment upon the rotting corpse of contemporary dating culture and instead lets the work speak for itself— a strategy that, however irritating I may have found it, more actively engages the audience during the play (as well as, I suspect, in the long discussions that likely take place afterward).

In that respect, I think Gionfriddo was cheated by the Pulitzer Prize committee, which honored similarly themed, much more poorly executed contributions by Donald Margulies and David Lindsay-Abaire. However much I may have despised Gionfriddo's self-absorbed characters (and Gionfriddo for empathizing with them), I can imagine theaters staging Becky Shaw generations from now, much as they still stage Oscar Wilde.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.