According to Pew Research data reported in December of last year, 19 percent of brides surveyed said they met their spouses online. Social media, it seems, works for both workaholics and social klutzes.
After meeting two of the socially hapless characters in playwright Gina Gionfriddo’s play “Becky Shaw,” recently staged by UT theater students and alumni’s immersive theatre troupe, Lovers & Madmen, at Clarence Brown Theatre’s Lab Theatre, one can see why bypassing first-person meetings works in the social media age.
Max (Mark Jennings) has the social graces of a steamroller. Consideration for others’ feelings just doesn’t factor into his matter-of-fact calculations of either his financial advice for his adopted mother, Susan (Bonny Baker Pendleton), or life advice for his sister, Suzanne (Danielle Pressley).
Although Gionfriddo’s writing develops Max into a real enough person (the play was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize), in even more ways he is the personification of the thoughtless and inconsiderate, often offensive way people say things on Facebook, Twitter and any number of other social media sites.
When Susanne and her husband, Andrew (Curtis Power), fix Max up for a blind date with Becky Shaw (Meg Sutherland), Andrew’s emotionally-wrecked co-worker, Max, unintentionally makes a mess of things by treating Becky as another best-option decision to be made.
Becky is both attracted and repulsed. She expects Max to follow the dating customs of the old social order. As such, Becky is a metaphor herself. She’s caught in the gap between the old order requirements of Emily Post and the post-modern dating ethos of clicks, shares and cold-hearted deletions.
Becky even shows up in the formal first-date attire of an Emily-Postish dress, instead of the plain-wrapper, ambiguous duds of the generation that hasn’t quite figured out who they are.
MFA student Rebecca Johnson’s set design has only the minimal elements to suggest a hotel room and an apartment, as well as a largely empty stage for much of Act II. It works as the conceptual world in which communicators don’t exist in any specific place. But in the ambiguous and undefined multiverse of the electronic ether that has neither location nor timeframe.
Regardless of what one might expect from a contemporary woman playwright and a female title character, “Becky Shaw” is not a feminist play. The women characters are not confident in themselves or self-determinate.
Pressley’s Suzanne is completely unanchored since the death of her father, who anchored her world. He did everything for the family. To the point of leaving his widow, Susan, so unsure of herself she took up with a man Max is certain is trying to bilk her.
Power’s Andrew comes to Susanne’s rescue when he runs into her on vacation. He also tries to take Becky under his protection and stabilize her. Power is so at ease as Andrew, he brings a sense of calm to the entire play.
Director David Ratliff handles all of this with the kind of light touch that allows the actors to find their own center within each character. It gives the play a tone of reality.
Lovers & Madmen specializes in site-specific productions and immersive plays. The group makes important contributions to campus life.
Lovers & Madmen productions can be followed at www.loversandmadmen.org.