Sharp Claws in ‘Becky Shaw’ and ‘Cats: Jericho Ball’

Nonetheless, what is unique about Gionfrido is not her insight into cruelty, but her insight into transcending it and her ability to shift the audience’s sympathies in tiny increments. Trip Cullman’s precise staging heightens the tension, with clever rhythms and even indie sleazy songs, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Zero,” marking each scene change. The costumes by Kaye Voyce hit the mark almost shockingly, from Becky’s try-hard dress to Andrew’s fuzzy orange cardigan. Occasionally, a black plane compresses space, framing a character’s face, bathed in bleached white light, as if their vulnerabilities were being scanned by an MRI. Even David Zinn’s sets have a punchline: the cramped quarters feel minimalist, but they pay off in the second act, which suddenly reveals how some of the people live.

The cast is great, especially Brewer, whose performance as Becky (the ancestor of Thackeray’s social climbers) reminded me of the Ben Folds song “Fragile,” about an emotional terrorist full of excuses: “It’s like, ‘Crash, boom, whoops… did I break this, too?’ Emond Playing Susanna’s fussy mother, who delivers an Olympic-level take on her depressing observations, Ball, the sexy doctor in “Pitt” who points out how decency hides secret trapdoors, captures the sweat of a woman sinking inch by inch below her own moral standards.

But the driving force behind this production is Ehrenreich’s captivating performance as Max, the kind of character who would become a villain in many other stories and in many nineteen-eighties sex comedies. Ehrenreich’s deep growl, stand-up comedy, and underlying melancholy look lend a special moral weight to Max, a puppet master tangled in his own strings. He’s a mean-spirited know-it-all, but the more we get to know him, the more senseful and even moral his realpolitik becomes. No matter how callous his words, he radiated a surge of emotion: whenever someone came near him, a Geiger counter began to crackle, as if intimacy had a half-life of its own.

There’s a wonderful moment early in the play when Ehrenreich is left alone on stage with the anguished expression of a ragged, disoriented and abandoned little boy, a feeling that persists into later, even at Max’s most dangerous hour, when he seems to be doing an American Psycho cosplay. This is what separates Gianfrido’s drama from its flimsy farce—its willingness to treat failed love as something more important than losing a game, an oceanic force roiling beneath the screenplay’s surface nastiness. I laughed my head off the whole night, and at one point just before the night ended, I had tears in my eyes. It also feels like a real thing.

Across the street from “Becky Shaw,” another audience was ecstatic in “Cats: A Jellicle Ball” (Broadhurst Theatre), a wild revival based on perhaps the greatest dramatic insight in the history of musical comedy. The material its creators were messing with, of course, was Cats , the much-derided British mega-musical that dominated Broadway from 1982 to the turn of the century, infuriating Andrew Lloyd Webber haters with dramatic overstatements and narrative incoherence. Rather oddly enough, the original production was based on some light poetry by TS Eliot, had a sweet pop-rock soundtrack, was set in a junkyard, and was full of kitten-eared sensitive showboating, racing to reach the Heaviside level, a celestial MacGuffin. It made a lot of money but meant nothing.

Twenty years later, in 2019, the IP exploded again like a shingle. That January, the show spawned a pair of crass TV satires, first the musical Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, in which vaginal metaphors alternated with quips about cats ruining Broadway, and then two weeks later, the sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which had a farcical episode in which thirsty actor Titus Andromeda played a fictional cat, Frumbumbly, that sabotaged the production. Backstage, he realized he’d cracked the show’s code: The whole thing had been pure improv gibberish all along, and anyone who could gibberish convincingly could join the group. That December, a terrifying film adaptation seemed to confirm Cats’ point of view, condensing any lingering charm beneath layers of “digital fur technology.”