Almost 20 years after Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw first premiered, the play is coming to Buffalo. On the heels of the Tony-nominated Broadway revival, Alleyway Theatre is giving local audiences an opportunity to see Gionfriddo’s complicated, funny, and often uncomfortable story about relationships, morality, class, and the ways people judge one another.
Alleyway Theatre describes the play this way: “When Suzanna sets Max up on a blind date with Becky, she has absolutely no idea what she’s about to unleash. What follows is two hours of the sharpest, funniest, most cringey comedy you’ll see all season, about four people who think they’re perfectly fine and are absolutely not. Gina Gionfriddo’s laugh-out-loud / squirm-in-your-seat dark comedy is fresh off a celebrated Broadway run, now in its Buffalo Premiere.”
“I am so thrilled that we are producing Becky Shaw as our season opener,” said Chris J Handley, Executive Artistic Director. “I saw the original production at Second Stage in New York, I actually worked the box office for it, and it has been on my ‘list’ since then. I think Buffalo audiences will love the humor and the questions the play asks.”
Gionfriddo’s courageous and unflappable writing style might be traced back to her education. She studied at Brown University with legendary playwrighting professor Paula Vogel, who encouraged her to take risks. “The great thing about studying with Paula was – Paula was unshockable,” Gionfriddo said. “And she would say, shock me, try to shock me. So it was very freeing to feel like you could do anything.”
That freedom is evident in all of Gionfriddo’s plays, which are most frequently described as ’dark comedies.’ “I think that the word dark comes in because my plays are mostly comic,” she said. “And I think that it has to be in there, kind of as a warning… you don’t want to say they’re comedies without making sure people know they’re dark comedies.”
For Gionfriddo, comedy is not just a device for laughter, but a way to expose humanity in the characters and the audience themselves.
“I think humor in Becky Shaw becomes a little bit of a litmus test of people’s morality,” she said. “It’s sort of like people who laugh at people behind their backs and people who don’t.”
Becky Shaw was inspired in part by William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Gionfriddo became particularly interested in the character of Becky and the charged idea of a woman attempting to move from one social class into another. “It was so interesting to think about how charged it is when someone wants to marry from one class into another,” she said. “And I thought about what would it mean for a woman to be open about doing it now?”
It was from this question that Gionfriddo started writing the play, and in the process, “I found that the people who feel really kin to you can often be the people who share your worst qualities and your worst impulses… And I think Susanna in the play sort of feels this kinship with Max, but also knows that the kinship is based in some meanness and some other things. And I was interested in this idea of, ‘Do you marry the person you feel the bond with, or someone who you think is maybe a bit better than you and you could kind of marry up ethically?”
The play’s themes have not necessarily become less complicated with time. In fact, seeing the play again nearly two decades after its premiere gave Gionfriddo a different perspective on how audiences might respond to it. “We were concerned that there is maybe a meanness to the humor in this play that was not going to fly in 2026,” she said. Instead, the response surprised her: “I think actually the opposite happened, which is that people haven’t been writing it in a long time, so it felt fresh, and it felt different.”
That shifting perspective is part of what keeps Becky Shaw alive. Gionfriddo said audiences who have seen the play frequently ask her the same question: What happens after the final scene?
Gionfriddo doesn’t answer, and feels the discussion may be more interesting than the answer.
For now, Gionfriddo is happy to see Becky Shaw is finding new audiences, nearly two decades after she wrote it.
“I’m excited that it’s being done, and I hope people enjoy it.”
Becky Shaw runs September 12 – October 3, 2026, at Alleyway Theatre.
