Love is a citric business. In Gina Gionfriddo’s super-astringent Off-Broadway hit, a blind date turns so sour that it almost ends the matchmakers’ marriage. Every line is a poisoned dart and every character is an assassination. It’s tough on them but sublimely funny for us: Gionfriddo’s play has the moral subtlety of Jane Austen but it yanks its characters’ illusions down with the off-kilter ease that’s usually the trademark of access-all-areas TV satirists like Larry David or Tina Fey.
The issue at stake here is issues. Issues are a relationship cliché which have become stock comic fodder, but ‘Becky Shaw’s tics and fetishes are bizarrely plausible and acutely observed. Initially, recently married Suzanna and Andrew seem sexy and sane: in comparison, Suzanna’s adopted brother, Max, and Andrew’s desperate 35-year-old colleague, Becky (the mismatched blind daters) seem like a heartless corporate douchebag and a hopeless flake. But everything is relative here. And the liberal culture that embraces talking about feelings and telling white lies gets devastatingly exposed, mostly by Max, whose cruel honesty hits everyone’s carefully cultivated sense of self-worth like an SUV crashing into a cuddle.
Max – an orphan-turned wealth-manager – is an irresistible anti-hero with knockout lines. (To reject porn is to ‘choose a disgusting reality over a beautiful fiction’, he opines.) David Wilson Barnes delivers them with a deadpan panache which recalls Kevin Spacey or a young Bill Murray. In comparison, Vincent Montuel’s doe-eyed would-be writer, Andrew, is a slightly sappy post-feminist pin-up. Porn ‘makes him cry’. But is he turned on by weeping women? And is Daisy Haggard’s gorgeously desperate Becky a victim or a sexual predator, out for snuggles and easy money? Max has a genius for causing offence, and seduced Anna Madeley’s highly strung Suzanna after telling her that her dead dad was gay – but is he guilty of anything worse than bad manners?
Gionfriddo’s play has so much fun asking these questions that it’s over before you realise it hasn’t answered any of them. There’s virtue in ambivalence – especially when it exposes the cruelty of the romantic economy, where being wanted or rejected – or even being able to joke or dress as if you don’t care – can drive your value up and down and determine how precious people think you are. After the calamitously funny escalations, the slightly lacklustre ending is a bit of a downer. But ‘Becky Shaw’ is smart, stylishly acted and painfully funny.