Becky Shaw ★★★★★

Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 Pulitzer-finalist play, has a wickedly clever structure. The first act is a build-up to a blind date between the titular Becky (Madeline Brewer, credible and vulnerable) and money manager Max (Alden Ehrenreich), and when the second act begins, two days have passed since the date.

Never shown: the actual date.

As a result, the audience learns about how the date went as Becky or Max reveal the details to the other characters, Suzanna (Lauren Patten), a thirty-something graduate student and Max’s quasi-sibling, and her husband, Andrew (Patrick Ball), an aspiring writer. Gionfriddo effectively builds suspense with Becky’s first line in the second act — “Something bad happened on my date with Max” — and from that moment on, this rollercoaster of causticity starts its climb, hurling up and down, only stopping when the play ends, Becky and Max still unsure how to move forward.

Excitingly, Gionfriddo has no interest in a basic romcom set-up where disastrous initial impressions are a smoke screen for a love that is inevitable and can’t be denied. She has no interest in obvious heroes or villains, and as secrets and feelings emerge in the verbal hurricanes, how you feel about these characters will likely shift, as in the scene where Becky and Max meet up for the first time since the disastrous date. He tells her there will not be a second. She wants to know why.

MAX: Oh, for God’s sake…

BECKY: I’m not angry. I just want to know what I did–

MAX: Jesus, I’m allowed to not be interested. I don’t owe you an explanation.

BECKY: I just want to know what it is about me, so I can–in the future–correct it.

MAX: This! I didn’t return your calls. Any normal person would have–

BECKY: But you said you knew at the restaurant. What did I do?

MAX: This! You force people to hurt you!

BECKY: I made you feel you’d hurt me? That’s it? You don’t want to be with a woman you feel you hurt?

MAX: Would you want to be with a man you could hurt?

BECKY: But that’s love, isn’t it? Anything that matters carries the potential for hurt…

MAX: Love, Becky. We had one date.

BECKY: I gave you power prematurely. Is that it?

MAX (rising to leave): I don’t want to do this.

BECKY: This doesn’t hurt me! It helps. Please sit for a second. I took some wrong turns, Max, and I changed. See, when I was in college…

MAX: I don’t… I don’t care.

Director Trip Cullman keeps the play teetering on a knife’s edge, and that tightwalk continually yields laughs and gasps from the audience. Ruthless honesty reigns in these characters’ lives, as evidenced by the first-scene evisceration of Suzanna by her mother Susan, who’s weary of her daughter’s ongoing depression.

SUSAN: You didn’t lose a child or even a breast. Your father died of natural causes after a life well-lived. That’s not loss, it’s transition.

SUZANNA: How can you… It’s a huge loss.

SUSAN: It’s an old man dying peacefully. It’s not tragic.

SUZANNA: He was my Dad.

SUSAN: And you’re an adult. This… This is a costume.

SUZANNA :What—my clothes?

SUSAN: The black dress. You’re infatuated with your grief. You think you’ve finally found something that will distinguish you.

Susan, played by the invaluable Linda Emond, only appears in the play’s beginning and final scenes, but her presence is so powerful that she almost manages to walk away with the play.

Almost.

Preventing that grand theft is Ehrenreich, who is making one of the most impressive Broadway debuts in recent memory. He captivates — every grimace, every gesture, every look. And like all great stage actors, he never telegraphs what’s ahead. He surprises. Just like this superb revival.