Sharp Claws at “Becky Shaw” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball”
Minutes into Second Stage’s scorching, spectacular revival of Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” (at the Hayes), an audience member groaned loudly, in pleasure and shock. Ten minutes later, someone else muttered, “Oh, my God.” There were waves of guffaws and, also, supportive finger-snapping. Comedy is about chemistry, but it felt like something more cathartic was in the air, in response to Gionfriddo’s savage corkscrew of a sex farce, which spirals around a blind date gone very, very wrong. First staged in 2008, it’s evolved into a hot-pepper challenge, a way to steel-man your illusions about love.
The play opens in a pitch-dark, three-star-hotel room, a step down for a bereaved family that has lost its patriarch and, as important, its promised inheritance. Suzanna (Lauren Patten), a moody, black-clad psychology grad student with a “Gashlycrumb Tinies” cuteness, is curled on the bed, watching a true-crime show. “It soothes me and I need it. Don’t judge me,” she tells Max (Alden Ehrenreich), the brusque finance guy who has paid for both her room and her mother’s room. Max turns out to be Suzanna’s brother, kind of—his position in the family is unstable and gets only unstabler. What is clear is their intense bond, the brash intimacy of people addicted to repartee and raised by liars. Max offers Suzanna some tough-love advice, and, by the end of the scene, the stakes, as they say in TV, have been raised.
The story speeds up from there: suddenly, Suzanna is married to Andrew (Patrick Ball), a nice guy who cries at pornography, with whom she lives in a two-star apartment in Providence, Rhode Island. When the newlyweds decide to set Max up with Andrew’s co-worker Becky (Madeline Brewer, all pinwheel eyes and fawn legs), she turns up overdressed and clearly nervous. “Wow, you look like a birthday cake,” Max says. Rattled, she asks for guidance from Suzanna. “Inasmuch as you can, don’t show him any weakness,” Suzanna tells her.
Gionfriddo is something of an expert on true crime, having taken the playwright’s path to survival—a steady gig writing for “Law & Order.” But in her stage plays, including “Rapture, Blister, Burn” and “Can You Forgive Her?,” she’s established herself as an authority on the more covert violence of feminine perversity, with a refreshing frankness about how easily weakness and strength can masquerade as each other. Her dialogue, which is dense with bleak, Wildean zingers, has, on the surface, a LaBute-ian, Mamet-y sting, the exfoliating bite of a Jacobean satire of social hypocrisy; a few dynamics reminded me of some of the more romantic scenes on the HBO show “Succession.” “Love is a happy by-product of use,” Max insists. Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Linda Emond), decrees, “No one respects a woman who forgives infidelity.” There are rolling debates about the nature of morality: “Does pornography make you cry?” Max asks, skeptically. “No, but it should and I wish it did,” Suzanna shoots back.
Still, what distinguishes Gionfriddo is not her ear for cruelty but her ability to see beyond it, and to shift the prism of audience sympathy, in tiny increments. This tension is intensified by Trip Cullman’s precise staging, which is smartly paced, down to the indie-sleaze anthems, such as “Zero,” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that mark each set change. The costumes, by Kaye Voyce, are almost alarmingly on target, from Becky’s try-hard dress to Andrew’s fuzzy orange cardigan. Once in a while, black flats compress the space, framing a single character’s face, bathed in a bleaching white light, as if their vulnerabilities were being scanned by an MRI. Even David Zinn’s set includes a punch line: the cramped quarters feel minimalist, but they pay off in the second act, with a sudden revelation about the way some people get to live.
The cast is terrific, particularly Brewer, whose Becky, an ancestor of Thackeray’s social climber, reminded me of the Ben Folds song “Fragile,” about an emotional terrorist full of excuses: “It’s, like, ‘Crash, boom, oops . . . did I break that, too?’ ” Emond, as Suzanna’s hypercritical mother, puts an Olympic-level spin on her withering observations. Ball, that hot doctor on “The Pitt,” nails the way decency can conceal secret trapdoors; Patten, as Suzanna, captures the flop sweat of a woman falling, bit by bit, below her own moral standards.
But the engine driving the production is Ehrenreich’s magnetic performance as Max, the sort of character who, in many other stories and lots of nineteen-eighties sex comedies, would be the villain. With his subdued growl, rat-a-tat standup-comic delivery, and air of couched melancholy, Ehrenreich lends a peculiar moral weight to Max, a master puppeteer tangled up in his own strings. He’s a caustic know-it-all, but, the more we learn about him, the more defensible, and even ethical, his Realpolitik becomes. However callous his words are, he radiates turbulent emotion: whenever someone steps close to him, a Geiger counter starts crackling, as if intimacy itself had a half-life.
There’s a wonderful moment early in the play when Ehrenreich is left alone onstage, with a look of such ragged disorientation and abandonment, of little-boy distress, that it lingers, later, even when Max is at his most cutting, when he seems to be doing “American Psycho” cosplay. It’s the quality that distinguishes Gionfriddo’s play from a brittle farce—its willingness to recognize failed love as something bigger than a player losing a game, an oceanic force roiling beneath the script’s surface nastiness. After laughing my head off all evening, there was a moment, just before the night ended, when my eyes teared up. That, too, felt like the real thing.
Across the street from “Becky Shaw,” there’s another audience going crazy with joy, at “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (at the Broadhurst), a delirious revival grounded in what may be the greatest dramaturgical insight in musical-comedy history. The material its creators are messing with is, of course, “Cats,” the much mocked British mega-musical that dominated Broadway from 1982 through the turn of the century, infuriating haters of Andrew Lloyd Webber, theatrical bombast, and narrative incoherence. Based, pretty bizarrely, on some light verse by T. S. Eliot, the original production, with its treacly pop-rock score, was set inside a junk yard full of touchy-feely showoffs in kitten ears, competing to reach the Heaviside Layer, a celestial MacGuffin. It made tons of money and no sense.
Two decades later, in 2019, the I.P. flared back up again, like shingles. That January, the show sparked a pair of rude TV satires, first, on the musical-mad series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” where vagina metaphors alternate with wisecracks about “Cats” ruining Broadway, and then, two weeks later, on the sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” with a hilarious plot in which the thirsty actor Titus Andromedon crashes the production as the made-up cat Frumbumbly. Backstage, he realizes that he’s cracked the show’s secret code: the entire thing is and always has been pure, improvised nonsense—and anyone who can babble convincingly enough can join the ensemble. That December, a hideous movie adaptation seemed to confirm that view of “Cats,” by congealing any lingering charm beneath layers of “digital fur technology.”
And then, in a miraculous turn, “Cats” scored one more life, downtown. The 2024 revival at PAC NYC, which was co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, was grounded in a genius, faintly psychedelic insight: that Eliot’s 1939 doggerel was much more logically set in the modern-day Black-ballroom scene, the fragile, shimmering world of queer outsiders captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” The reframe worked like a set of corrective lenses, sharpening sentimental mush into something with meaning and claws. “Cats” was, after all, a story about flamboyant street creatures who adopt new names and alter egos, shape-shifters whose hyperbolic personae at once reflected and satirized the straight world. Queering “Cats” was the inverse of appropriation: the camp version was the authentic one.
Moving this delicate variant to Broadway posed a risk. In midtown, the show’s exuberance could have dimmed, as it did for “Titaníque,” the Céline Dion pastiche, a charming goof that feels too slight for its new venue, right across Forty-fourth Street, at the St. James. “Jellicle Ball,” in contrast, confidently fills its space, starting with its lovely, simple opening image, of a d.j. pulling a Diana Ross album out of a plastic crate—a memento mori of the eighties—and holding it up to the knowing crowd. Everything old feels new again, down to the iconic yellow-eyed logo, displayed up on a catwalk lined with TV screens, in which the static cat-eye pupils first wriggle, then reveal themselves as slinky, silhouetted dancers.
From then on, the show never stops moving, with dizzy, propulsive choreography by Omari Wiles, of the House of NiNa Oricci, and Arturo Lyons, of the House of Miyake-Mugler, and epic, decade-spanning couture by Qween Jean. On a runway, dancers duckwalk and spin, stick their hands in the air and wiggle their fingers, then drop into splits and shoot their legs into the air like exclamation marks. Every body and every gender gets a turn, from the silky-haired, pipe-cleaner-limbed, jaw-droppingly limber Robert (Silk) Mason, as Magical Mister Mistoffelees, to Nora Schell, as the strutting, bodacious Bustopher Jones, to a magisterial eighty-year-old André De Shields, as Old Deuteronomy. Not every number landed—that old warhorse (warcat?) “Memory” lacked the requisite grit and sorrow—but perfection felt beside the point, in a performance that was designed to celebrate resilience, against all odds.
TV shows such as “Pose” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” had clearly primed the crowd to read the room, and to hush, with respect, during the lovely homage to ballroom and queer icons that opens the second act. They roared, later on, offering up the wildest cheers for the ballroom legend Junior LaBeija, who had been observing the proceedings from the proscenium, skeptically, through neon-green eyeshadow and thick, spidery lashes. When LaBeija, as Gus the Theatre Cat, finally strolled onstage to revisit his glory days, waggling his long, polished claws, a younger Gus (Jonathan Burke) appeared, like a mirror dancing toward him. It was a beautiful suggestion of the show’s open-armed sensibility, a way of lovingly glorifying both the past and the present, and, fingers crossed, the future . . . now and forever. ♦