‘Becky Shaw’ delivers
Photographed by Colleen R. Mond
Written by Emilie Kefelas
The Mondanaro Theater presented Sunday’s matinee of “Becky Shaw.” The Pulitzer prize nominated play ran Thursday, Jan. 28 through Sunday, Jan. 31 at Crites Hall. Director Mark Tymchyshyn’s vision aligned a cinematic arrangement, where the eye forced upon a character and setting. The audience’s eyes wandered, but with “Becky Shaw,” mine never felt that urge.
The production designers created an effective scene with creative lighting techniques. Instead of providing the audience with programs listing the cast and crew, the show credits were projected onto one of three tall screens onstage. These screens would later transform into the walls of a hotel room and then to an apartment’s wallpaper.
The main character Susanna and her dear friend/adopted brother Max tango around a year’s worth of family drama and hasty relationships. Max and Susanna’s complicated role in each other’s lives amuses and hurts when Susanna’s father’s death rallies immediate family financial chaos. This triggers an abundance of wine consumption, sailor swearing, and exasperated, hands-on-hips poses.
What playwright Gina Gionfriddo (who was also a screenwriter for “Law & Order”) and the cast of “Becky Shaw” managed to avoid during the show’s nearly two-hour run was the contagious rhythmic predictability of confrontations and clichés too often seen in comedy-dramas. Gionfriddo skips ahead in these characters’ lives, leaving unexplained gaps in the show’s timeline. We are rarely told anything flat out about the past or the drama missed in between these transitions.
I commend casting director Andra Reeve-Rabb on selecting five actors all compelling in their craft, but not fake in their deliverance. By that I mean the tension on stage is not built by forced screaming. Make no mistake, fights abound in “Becky Shaw,” but they are organized in a fashion you can sense them boiling beneath the rind, like a volcano.
Heather Schroeder is a standout talent as Susanna, who is almost always onstage. Schroeder occasionally commands attention from the viewer, delivering great lines with a crystal voice. Zane Harris is the embodiment of the skinny jean-sporting, coffee shop liberal hipster as Susanna’s husband, Andrew Porter.
Becky is wonderfully played with all the coy innocence of a damsel in distress by Hailey Vest. The puppy-eyed look is never prescribed to Becky’s description, but Vest is perfect when she plays up her character’s hypnotic, wordless stare that emotes, “Look at me, pity me. Now take care of me.”
Gionfriddo’s dialogue is enjoyably clever and sneaky with quick slips of dark wisecracks about class, self-harm, and sexuality. Many of these remarks come from Max, who –though unorthodox in his approach at times– manages to be one of the show’s most compelling features. Susanna mentions when she was young she used to pray Max never had to leave to go back home. It is the same watching Walker Harrison as Max; you never want him to leave the stage.
Harrison had many of the play’s best lines next to Jennefer Morris-Lough’s Susan, Susanna’s sharp-tongued Southern Belle mother. Max is onstage more than Susan, but thanks to Morris-Lough’s gifted ear and well-timed one-lined zingers, both ended the show with an equal amount of laughs to their credit.
If the show’s confrontations are like lava, Becky Shaw is the tornado inserted to screw up an already convoluted circumstance. This young, delicate woman wearing a pink dress comes off as this seemingly harmless spacefiller when she’s first introduced, though she quickly evolves into an unwelcomed knot frustrating the comfortable annoyances in Susanna and Max’s lives.
One has to wonder why Gionfriddo titled the show after a supporting character who does not even arrive onstage until well into the drama of Act I. Maybe the name is not as important as the way the character enters the show, how she behaves, or how she confuses us throughout her entire presence. Becky is a distressing personality to tolerate because she makes us feel guilty, but watching her unravel is the equivalent to reliving horrible memories of lying and playing at others’ emotions in the name of self-pity and pride.
The show ended without either a conclusive “happily ever after,” or clear winner and loser. That’s reality. Gionfriddo knew this when she wrote “Becky Shaw,” and Sunday’s production delivered on that impact beautifully.
