If you thought modern dating was dysfunctional, Becky Shaw makes celibacy seems like a holiday. Directed by Trip Cullman, Gina Gionfriddo's famously biting dark comedy brings together a stacked cast - including Madeline Brewer, Alden Ehrenreich, and Lauren Patten - and drops us straight into a blind date that goes spectacularly wrong.

It rattled audiences Off-Broadway the first time around - but will critics be back for a second date, or is Becky Shaw destined to be ghosted?

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Becky Shaw Broadway Reviews

"With Trip Cullman's Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater, where it opened on Monday night, I mean that as a compliment. Besides which, the play's male characters are also magnificently flawed. We don't require a rooting interest in them as individuals to be caught up in the story. The cast is terrific. The show moves fast. The many laugh lines land." - The New York Times

"While Becky is the catalyst for the play's chain reaction - and Brewer nimbly inhabits the charged space between exploited and exploiter - it's the seemingly impenetrable Max who is at last cracked open. Ehrenreich is superb in the role, as unafraid to be horrid as he eventually is to be broken. In a quintet of fine performances, his stands out in this moment so removed from when Becky Shaw debuted (2008 was not bursting at the seams with essays on our crisis of masculinity)." - Vulture

"First produced in New York by Second Stage off-Broadway, the play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009. The same company has revived it at its Broadway house, the Hayes Theater, in a crisply staged and terrifically acted production directed by Trip Cullman that keeps the play's serrated edges as cutting as ever." - The Wall Street Journal

"Cullman's revival, which marks Becky Shaw's Broadway debut, serves its plot very well. The production moves fast, even the set changes have humor and purpose, and Kaye Voyce's costume design is perfection, and all five actors are first-class, including the scene-stealing Linda Emond as Susie's acidic mother." - Time Out New York

"Gina Gionfriddo's 2008 class-conscious satire receives a pitch-perfect revival in the new Broadway production directed by Trip Cullman for Second Stage Theater. With its expert cast firing on all cylinders, Becky Shaw sends laughter rocketing throughout the audience with its scathing portrayal of social mores being blown to smithereens." - New York Stage Review

"When the laughter fades and you've wiped your hands of these utterly unlikable characters, all the upsetting questions they pondered remain. Becky Shaw touches something tender and doesn't stop there. Like its namesake's devious smile, it lingers." - Entertainment Weekly

"But this nuanced and funny American play does illuminate the corrosive power of very needy people and their ability to take down others to fill their own voids. It struck me as an interesting choice for a first date in that it should spark immediate conversation as to whether either party wants a second one." - New York Daily News

"Gionfriddo is a master of dialogue. Her characters, particularly Max and the Slaters, live to fight; tearing each other apart is, in its own warped way, a form of affection. Credit to director Trip Cullman for staging the show to highlight their jousting. At times Becky Shaw feels like The Birdcage by way of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - Variety

"Seventeen years after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Becky Shaw finally arrives on Broadway, and noting that it was worth the wait is an understatement. If the nearly two-decades-in-the-making arrival meant we had to wait for this excellent cast to come together, all the better." - Deadline

"The audience gasped almost as frequently as it laughed during the performance of Becky Shaw, a fierce, funny comedy that revolves around a bad blind date. What audibly startled the audience was what some of the characters say to one another." - New York Theater

"That is the genius of Gionfriddo's script, and of Cullman's clockwork direction, which relies on the cast to help change scenes in ways that suggest the precision timing of an old-fashioned bedroom farce. This choice does help strip away distractions so that we can focus more clearly on the characters." - Culture Sauce

"Gionfriddo's play clearly covers a lot of risky ground. It is so relentlessly hysterical you barely notice the mark it leaves. Director Trip Cullman's direction is sexy, light and swift." - New York Post