ATW Digest - Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw opens off-Broadway - read the reviews
By Andy Propst on Jan 9, 2009 | In ATW Digest
AmericanTheaterWeb
Review - Becky Shaw - A Dark Modern Comedy of Manners
New York Times
First-Date Dyspepsia and Marriage Queasiness
Gina Gionfriddo’s corker of a new play, “Becky Shaw,” is as engrossing as it is ferociously funny.
New York Daily News
'Becky Shaw' is 'slick, stylish,' but a bit too clever
A social study of haves and have-nots and the blurry line between the two, "Becky Shaw" is slick and stylish and flecked with pungent moments, but it buckles under too much clever dialogue.
amNY New York City Theater
Theater Review of Becky Shaw
It takes a while to see where exactly playwright Gina Gionfriddo is going in her slow-paced, verbose, yet intriguing black comedy “Becky Shaw,” which just opened at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage after a successful run at Kentucky’s Humana Festival.
New York Post
Sharp wit part of setup
Anyone planning to play matchmaker should first see "Becky Shaw." Gina Gionfriddo's scath ing, class-conscious comedy is a...
Bergen Record
Praised comedy opens off-Broadway "Becky Shaw"
Associated Press
Gionfriddo's 'Becky Shaw' Is a Sharp Social Comedy
''Becky Shaw,'' which opened Thursday at off-Broadway's Second Stage, is a sharp social comedy of articulate anger laced with large helpings of angst and ambition. The perfect nourishment for theatergoers starved for a dramatic conflagration or two.
Bloomberg.com
Tantalizing `Becky Shaw' Delivers Freakish Folks, Pithy Humor: John Simon
The plot of Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” is inconsequential and the characters are mundane, but the talk is a blue streak verging on purple. Presented by New York’s Second Stage, it is a comedy that subsists on its sweaty dialogue alone.
Financial Times
Becky Shaw, Second Stage, New York
Too often this play descends into soap-opera situations, writes Brendan Lemon
Variety
Review: Becky Shaw
...any charge of superficiality hardly counts as criticism, when character surfaces are so artfully defined by the savvy cast of Peter DuBois' slick production for Second Stage.
Back Stage
Becky Shaw reviewed by David Sheward
It seems as though all the hot action in Becky Shaw takes place offstage. A daughter has a nasty confrontation with her mother's new lover in a hotel lobby. Newlyweds have their first serious fight.
TheaterMania
Review: Bekcy Shaw
Gina Gionfriddo's cynical play about modern romance is as bogus as a Ponzi scheme.
Talkin' Broadway
Review: Becky Shaw
Economic problem drama, vibrant comic soap opera, or both? Who knows and who cares? For the majority of Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo's deliciously unclassifiable new play at Second Stage, it hardly matters whether you're immersed in a hard-boiled domestic page-turner or an acid-toned satire of values and finances gone impossibly awry. All that's relevant is the insinuating energy of the title character, the helpless people in her orbit who are being wrenched apart by her gravitational pull, and the delirious plot twists and barbed-wire dialogue that unite them all in an addictive theatrical frenzy. . . .
CurtainUp
Review: Becky Shaw
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