You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable selling point for a New York play than a bad date. The humiliation, disappointment, confusion and hilarity of a date gone awry is an evergreen anecdote, the grist for good gossip and perhaps even better comedy. Such is the pitch of Becky Shaw, Second Stage Theater’s new production of Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 play, which promises a blind date that, of course, “spirals spectacularly off the rails”. Even nearly 20 years later, one person’s bad date is another’s great theater, though the inciting incident for this taut and frequently funny play’s interpersonal disaster is less romantic horror than four cases of festering emotional trauma. It makes for a strange brew of narcissism, cynicism and manipulation which still somehow, despite its poison, manages to cast a nostalgic glow on the pre-smartphone dating era.
Director Trip Cullman wisely decided against updating the original play’s text for its Broadway debut this season. Instead, the onetime Pulitzer finalist exists, for better and for worse, as a relic of a not-so-distant but totally foreign time to the modern dater. We transport to 2007, an era of flip phones and nude patent leather heels (period-lite costumes by Kaye Voyce), a time when you could plausibly send someone to physically track down the person who has not texted you back. The central foursome in this two-act production, now at the Hayes Theater, may spout dated references to the Green party and the Iraq war, but their archetypes are evergreen: the well-meaning but self-absorbed intellectual, the self-deflecting misanthrope, the self-affirming do-gooder and, last not but least, the perpetual victim.
