Finally, finally! A really good new play that I can recommend without reservation. It has been such a long dry spell that I had begun to despair of the whole season, both on- and off-Broadway, until seeing Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw at the Second Stage. The play is full of surprises, both aesthetic and thematic, and Gionfriddo produces the kind of sharp, high-speed, and high-potency dialogue that so many playwrights aspire to and so few achieve. She writes in a peculiarly masculine style, more akin to Mamet than to any other contemporary author I can think of (though her work is in no way imitative of his). Consulting the program at intermission, I was actually shocked to discover that this rather hard play, as bracing as a cold wind, which resolutely works against the grain of contemporary ideals of sensitivity, had been written by a woman.

The action begins a few months after the death of the beloved father of Suzanna (Emily Bergl), who is still devastated by the loss. She is confronted by Max (David Wilson Barnes), who was adopted by Suzanna’s parents at the age of ten and has grown up more or less as a member of the family. Max, a successful businessman, is now the family’s money manager, and he has the unenviable task of informing Suzanna and her tough, acidic mother Susan (Kelly Bishop) that the old man had badly mismanaged his business and that now the two women are not nearly