The Post-Modern Romance of "Becky Shaw"

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl is one of the most recognizable, reliable and fecund tropes in the theater. It is how the story plays out that can tell you a lot not only about a playwright but about the times that have helped shape his or her work. Judging from the several plays about modern romance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I have seen over the past year—Hunting and Gathering, The Drunken City, Reasons to be Pretty—our time seems to be feeling decidedly unromantic about romance. Love, says one of the characters in Becky Shaw, the new post-modern romantic comedy currently playing at the Second Stage Theatre, is “doing stuff that you don’t want to do.”

Becky Shaw was written by Gina Gionfriddo, a writer for TV’s “Law & Order” shows and the author of After Ashley, a trenchant social comedy about fame that had a short but acclaimed run at the Vineyard Theatre four seasons ago. Gionfriddo’s new work about a quartet of star-crossed lovers was last year’s hit at the Humana Festival of New American Plays that is held each spring at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and the minute I read about it, I started lighting candles for it to come to New York.

It’s arrived with the same director, Peter DuBois, and two of the original cast members—Annie Parisse, who plays the title character; and David Wilson Barnes, who plays the central character, a cynic named Max. And the show's newcomers—Thomas Sadoski, terrific in the off-Broadway production of Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty; Emily Bergl, an engaging spitfire; and the always wonderfully astringent Kelly Bishop—are just as intriguingly offbeat.

The play does get off to a somewhat slow and slightly confusing start. Parisse’s Becky doesn’t even show up until the middle of the first act. But the acting is smart throughout, Gionfriddo’s lines are laugh-out-loud funny and it’s hard not to have a good time. Even though that’s the last thing you’d be doing if you found yourself in the situations the characters face as they try to sort through their romantic entanglements and financial woes.

As many reviewers have pointed out, there’s an apparently intentional connection between the title character and Becky Sharp, the pointy-elbowed social climber in "Vanity Fair," William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic novel about 19th century British society. But I confess that although I have happy memories of reading the book alongside a pool during one winter vacation in Cancun, I wasn't able to draw the appropriate comparative lit parallels. (Although you can click here to read a CurtainUp exegesis that does exactly that.)

Maybe I was just too obsessed with the romantic stuff. For the characters in Becky Shaw don’t just enter relationships with baggage, they come with complete luggage sets. And the solace that Gionfriddo offers is as far from the old love-as-a-cure-all as you can get. Compromising your standards, she suggests, may be the best way to get a relationship. Lying—to your partner, to yourself—is probably the best way to keep it. Bishop’s character, the mother who is essentially the one true grown-up in the group, seems to sum up the philosophy when she urges everyone to stop worrying about their problems and instead just eat a nice dinner, accompanied by a good bottle of wine.

It’s a bleak take on love and yet, Bill and I felt surprisingly buoyant when we left the theater and walked down the street to have our own dinner and wine at Le Petit Un Deux Trois, which recently opened in the space that used to house the old Le Madeleine on the corner of 43rd and Ninth. Maybe tough-minded pragmatism is the best we can hope for in these unsettling times and so we’re particularly grateful when it comes leavened with a little humor: a tonic of sulfur mixed with molasses.

And Bill and I didn’t seem to be the only ones happy to quaff it down. “We’ve just seen the best play,” said one of the women who sat at the table next to us, obviously delighted to share the news. What?, we asked. She flashed us the Playbill of Becky Shaw.

The Inner Beauty of “Reasons to be Pretty”

Say what you will about Neil LaBute (and Lord knows people have said plenty) the man knows how to write dialog that sounds the way real people talk. And, of course, the people in LaBute plays talk a lot, often at loud decibels and frequently saying things that aren’t very nice. All of this is true in the new MCC Theater production of Reasons to be Pretty, a play about two working class couples and how the men in those relationships deal with the perceived attractiveness of their women.

Like most people I first became aware of LaBute when “In the Company of Men,” the film adaptation of his play about two male co-workers who trifle with the affections of a deaf female colleague, won the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 and set off a firestorm of stories debating the film’s misogyny. LaBute’s background as a convert to Mormonism (his potty-mouthed and sexually charged works eventually got him excommunicated) further stoked the flames. And the playwright’s prolificity (11 of his plays have been produced in New York during the last nine years) and his ability to attract big name talent (Calista Flockhart, Liev Schreiber, Ben Stiller, Sigourney Weaver, and Jeffrey Wright have all appeared in his plays) have helped maintain the heat.

As a result, I may have seen more plays by LaBute than by any other playwright, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare. I haven’t liked them all. LaBute can be self-consciously provocative, mischievously manipulative and he isn’t nearly as hip as he thinks he is—a reference to Eddie Murphy in the current play would have been cooler and funnier if it had cited Chris Rock instead. Even so, I’ve been fascinated by each of his works. LaBute is smart and thoughtful (click here to listen to an interview he gave earlier this year) and he writes the kind of plays that get the people who see them talking after the show just as much as his voluble characters do on stage. And that’s a good thing, and an unfortunately rare thing in theater these days.

LaBute has said that Reasons to be Pretty is the final installment of a trilogy about physical appearance that began back in 2001 with The Shape of Things about a woman who overhauls a schlubby guy, and continued three years ago with my favorite Fat Pig, about a man who falls for an overweight woman but will do anything to keep his friends from knowing that he cares for her. The new show isn’t as malicious as the first or as moving as the second. And although it may be LaBute’s most mature work (some of the characters actually put aside their childish ways) it may also be his most preachy. “I’ve written about a lot of men who are really little boys at heart,” the playwright, now 45, says in a note in the Playbill before going on to add “but [this play] is really the first coming-of-age story I’ve written.”

That story is brought to vibrant life by a first-rate cast—Piper Perabo, Alison Pill, Pablo Schreiber and the very good Thomas Sadoski—and they’re superbly directed by Terry Kinney, co-founder of Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The performances alone are worth the price of the ticket. The show is only scheduled to run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through July 5 but it deserves a longer run.

My friend Bill and I saw it on a Saturday evening and as we came out of the theater, we had to thread our way through crowds of twentysomething couples and single-sex bands of friends who had come to act out their mating rituals in the Village. They looked like the kind of folks who take their relationship cues from chick flicks and Judd Apatow’s guy-centric comedies. If I were a more outgoing sort, I’d have pulled a few over and told them to see Reasons to be Pretty. It too speaks their language but it has more to say.