Becky Shaw
Opening Night: April 6, 2026
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
A blind date spirals spectacularly off the rails in Becky Shaw, the razor-sharp dark comedy from two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Gina Gionfriddo. When it made its New York premiere Off-Broadway at Second Stage, Becky Shaw left critics and audiences reeling, and The New York Times called it, “ferociously funny! A tangled tale of love, sex and ethics.” Now, this hilarious hit play is back and it’s making its Broadway debut! Strap yourselves in—Becky Shaw will make you laugh, gasp, and maybe take a break from dating…permanently.
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April 6, 2026
These characters aren’t likable at all. Yet they do the job so well, we don’t need them to be.
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April 6, 2026
Second Stage, which produced its off-Broadway premiere, has brought it back for a Broadway premiere that’s damn near perfect. Directed by Trip Cullman with a dynamism that perfectly matches Gionfriddo’s ever-surprising sensibilities, it introduces four pitch-perfect performances before its titular character even appears. Until then, it reacquaints us with mean comedy, the type that punches every which way without stooping to aimless, Scrappy-Doo belligerence.
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April 6, 2026
It’s Gina Gionfriddo’s iron guts that make an incisive, observant, scathing, and hilarious play like Becky Shaw possible.
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April 6, 2026
Seventeen years after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Gina Gionfriddo’s dark, sometimes giddy comedy Becky Shaw finally arrives on Broadway, and noting that it was worth the wait is an understatement none of its brutally honest anti-heroes would make. And if the nearly two-decades-in-the-making arrival meant we had to wait for this excellent cast to come together, all the better.
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April 6, 2026
Ehrenreich delivers an astonishing Broadway debut. He’s a raging, roiling alpha — a successful money manager who wields words like a battering ram, never happier than when he’s engaged in ferocious, bone-chiseling debate.
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April 6, 2026
And in a moment when so much theater puts on kid gloves to handle its material and its audience, it can be bracing to have a play walk right up and slap you across the face. That’s how Trip Cullman’s taut, take-no-prisoners production plays it — the pulse is allegro, the casual tone spiked with gasp-inducing wickedness.
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April 6, 2026
That the show can’t sustain this charge through its erratic second act is more a book issue than performance. The aftermath of Becky and Max’s (unseen) date are downstream conversations between characters that reveal the lopsidedness of their constitutions.
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April 6, 2026
Ehrenreich, a major talent who’s been dealt an unfair hand by Hollywood, is given the meatiest material of the cast. But the unique charm and liveliness he brings to it is vital. His idiosyncratic, casually vicious, worryingly lovable Max is one of the season’s must-see performances. Smart and sharp, he’s the lovechild of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg and Johnnie Walker.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2026
On the merit of its script alone, Becky Shaw is a rousing success. Not only is it deliciously, darkly hilarious, it’s excitingly clever in its simplicity. Arguably, not much happens onstage, in real-time. In fact the biggest event in the show occurs offstage. But we get the pleasure of the aftermath, and there’s oh so much angst and drama to relish in.
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April 6, 2026
Becky Shaw is highly entertaining: a laugh-a-minute play whose comedic concerns are refreshingly up to date. What bumps it to the next level—it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009—are the philosophical questions behind the banter. Can love be bought? When does support become manipulation? How might what seems more or less like a one-night stand come to mean more, or mean less?
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2026
There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-farce full of caricatures and not people… Though 150 minutes worth of poison-dart dialogue is fun to watch, by the end of the show, I couldn’t figure out what it was aiming for.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2026
Ehrenreich, bursting with charisma, is the clear standout, although he also benefits from his character having the funniest lines. Delivering insults with the panache of a Borscht Belt comedian, he subtly but devastatingly reveals the emotional desolation beneath Max’s brutal but always wildly entertaining nastiness. Emond delivers a master class in projecting disdainful authority through underplaying, and Brewer brings sly humor to her titular character whose seeming vulnerability masks a cunning ruthlessness.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2026
Trip Cullman directs this gem of a play with the precision of a jeweler’s blade. Every movement, choice of music, and even scene changes are meticulously designed. And at two and a half hours, we are left wanting even more. Becky Shaw was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009. It deserved to win.
READ THE REVIEWApril 6, 2026
This keenly observed and highly entertaining play, now on Broadway at 2nd Stage’s Helen Hayes Theatre under the unpretentious but lively direction of Trip Cullman, seems to have been lying in wait for this particular moment when we’re finally waking up to the consequences of a society that somehow decided every deeply felt emotion was worth both focus and validation.
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