Becky Shaw @ Huntington Theatre Company

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo

Directed by Peter DuBois

Seen Friday, 3/12 @ Huntington’s BU Theatre Mainstage

Becky Shaw is funny. In a really, really mean way. Which of course makes it worlds funnier than it would be if it were nice. This is about the least politically correct play I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s entirely to the benefit of the play. If you decide to write a mean-spirited comedy, you have two choices: you can either play the cruelty for a bit and then allow your characters some revelation that forces them to change their ways, or you can commit to it and… for lack of a better term (cause Tropic Thunder introduced the BEST EVER term), go “full retard” and keep your characters as mean-spirited as any ever written in entertainment. Gina Gionfriddo is committed, and for that, I thank her.

That’s not to say that the characters aren’t likable. Far from, actually. Walking out of the show, my fiancée and I both agreed that Max (Seth Fisher) was by far the most abhorrent character in the show, and yet we both loved him. He says awful things. By most people’s definition, he does some awful things. But he’s just like anyone else (OK, he’s just like me) except he’s got no filter. He says what he thinks, no matter who those comments might end up hurting. It may make him look like an awful person, but even that’s not exactly black and white, because he is fiercely loyal and dedicated to the Slater family, no matter what. He’s certainly not the nicest person in the world, but does he really have to be? He knows what is important to him, and fights for it. I don’t think anyone can fault him for that.

The story starts out in a New York City hotel room, where Max has brought mother and daughter Susan (Maureen Anderman) and Suzanna Slater (Keira Naughton) together to discuss the family’s finances following the passing of the family patriarch. Apparently Suzanna’s dad wasn’t quite the businessman everyone thought him to be, especially in his later years, and now the family is more or less broke. That sets up both ladies for a bit of culture shock as they need to move away from the privileged life they had previously led. Susan gets by with her new twentysomething boytoy Lester (whom we never see), while Suzanna – much more affected by her father’s death – takes comfort, at least for one night, with Max. Max is as close to being family as one can be without blood or marriage, but that doesn’t stop them from distracting themselves from the financial disaster the Slaters are facing.

Fast forward a bit, and we find Suzanna married to someone who is not Max – a sweet guy named Andrew (Eli James) that she met on a group ski trip. Four months and a quickie wedding in Vegas, and the happy couple are now living in suburban Rhode Island and just barely making ends meet. Suzanna thinks it’d be a good idea to set up Max with a girl from Andrew’s office, so a double-date is planned and Max arrives to dryly deride everything about Suzanna’s now-“pedestrian” life. Enter Andrew’s coworker, the sweet, apparently-naïve Rhode Island girl who gives the play its name. Saying Max and Becky hit it off would be… inaccurate at best, but they end up heading out on their own for what turns out to be the worst. First date. Ever. From there, we get to watch as friendships, marriages and all thresholds of sanity are tested in every which way, and along the way no one is spared from being the butt of a brutal joke.

And it works so well. The jokes, particularly the ones at Becky’s expense, are well-executed and perfectly timed (and, by the end, REALLY well-deserved). In fact, the cast as a whole has a really good rhythm going. Max and Suzanna in particular work exceedingly well together. There’s a perfect mix of familial, platonic love and blatant attraction, and the history there is made clear enough from the beginning of the show that the combination never tips into creepy territory. These are best friends who will always be best friends, but even that can’t stop Max from displaying his clear adoration of Suzanna. He’s protective of her and her family to a fault, especially where it concerns her husband, but that’s a shield that doesn’t apply to him. He will often dump all over Suzanna and her decisions, always in hilarious fashion. Fisher and Naughton hit their marks just right and sell everything about their relationship with a tone that allows the audience to appreciate and relate to that particular brand of love, even as Max says something awful about Suzanna’s life choices. Though it may not seem so at first, this story is about the two of them and how they grew up together, with the ultimate lesson being that sometimes you need to make a tough choice in order to point your life in the right direction, even if that direction moves you into territory that isn’t as comfortable or as safe as the way you’ve lived in the past.

The rest of the cast is equally fun. Anderman doesn’t get nearly as much stage time as the others, but she makes every moment worthwhile, particularly when discussing her late husband and his alleged indiscretions. It’s a brutal take on a high-society woman who took a tough fall but has thus far refused to acknowledge it ever happened. In parts she reminded me of Martha Rodgers on ABC’s “Castle,” which is a good thing – just the right mixture of upper-class grace (even if the legitimacy is questionable) and a biting tongue that spares no one in her life. James’s Andrew initially comes off as the weakest of the bunch, but you quickly learn that it’s not an issue of performance, but the result of a deeply flawed and naïve character who’s wishy-washy because he doesn’t really have any idea what he wants in life. For better or worse, he’s stuck with Suzanna, and we get to watch him work out if that’s really what is best for him in the long run.

And then there’s Becky Shaw. She doesn’t really come into her own and show all the cards in her hand until into the second act, when she meets up with Max for the first time since their disastrous date – a meeting that she seems to need, but Max wants absolutely no part of. Wendy Hoopes puts Becky through a transformation so brilliant, so devious and so… mean that for the first couple minutes it seems out of character, only because her persona in the first act was so beautifully sincere and believable. But once you figure which personality is really Becky, it makes the whole change so rewarding, and suddenly turns Becky not only into a fascinating character to watch but also into a very worthy foil for Max, and in the final scene leads to some of the most hilarious interactions I’ve seen onstage in a long time. It doesn’t matter how you look at it… one way or another there is one constant about Becky Shaw: the bitch is crazy, and the show is better because of it.

What I found interesting and unique about the script is how we come to realize Becky is nuts. On face value, the show isn’t all that unique – it’s a couple different standard “slice of life” stories wrapped into one package – but the presentation is the difference. Where a lot of other plays of the type do most of their communication through open discussion of feelings and emotional processes, Becky Shaw says a lot more through everyday marital arguments and family quibbles. In fact, the people who are much more verbally open emotionally are at best seen as weak (Andrew) and at worst called (and proven to be) completely freakin’ insane (Becky herself). Whether or not it was Gionfriddo’s intention, the derision of a character like Becky Shaw provided me with a nice little piece of theatrical parody which made her character progression all the more enjoyable. Even independent of Becky, scattered throughout the show are a couple beginnings of emotional diatribes and stereotypic overshares that are swiftly mocked as ridiculous. Naturally, most of the mocking comes from Max, ironically the only character who could probably use a proper examining of his feelings).

The technical aspects of the show are extremely well-managed, if not groundbreaking. Peter DuBois’s directing is nice and relaxed; nothing ever felt forced or seemed to get in the way of the very conversational dialogue style the cast managed so well. The sets were nicely functional, and did well to distinguish between the personalities in the show (see Andrew & Suzanna’s Rhode Island apartment vs. Susan’s Floridian sitting room). One piece that did stand out nicely was the music choices, pretty much used only during scene changes, but the sound nicely matched the modern, urbanite style some of the characters so desperately clung to.

Ultimately, though, the show is held together wonderfully by the cast and the writing. Gionfriddo’s got a pretty damn funny show, and on the nose delivery from the entire ensemble makes it a pleasure to watch. It’s maybe not for the faint of heart – these are “real people” who use real language (many words have four letters), which has never bothered me, but I was happy to find myself giggling along with a good portion of the audience, many who looked to me to be prime examples of the Huntington’s subscriber base (twice my age, and probably twice my income to match). Either the crowds in Boston’s traditional theater scene are loosening up a little bit, or Becky Shaw is just a damn funny show no matter who you are; I know the latter is true, but I’ll hold out some hope for the theatergoing regulars as well.