In 2008, playwright Gina Gionfriddo ’91 watched Becky Shaw captivate audiences for the first time, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination (her first) and a reputation for unflinching comedic writing. In April 2026, the show returned in a limited-run revival at the Hayes Theater on Broadway. The new staging has been a critical darling, now with two Tony Award nominations to its name: Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play, for Alden Ehrenreich, and Best Play Revival.
Becky Shaw orbits around four interconnected characters — Suzanna (Lauren Patten), Andrew (Patrick Ball), Becky (Madeline Brewer), and Max (Ehrenreich) — and a blind date that spins out into chaos. Much has been written about the timelessness of Gionfriddo’s script, as well as the sharpness of her writing, with lines that shock and delight audiences.
“It’s a play of barbed wire and paper cuts, with salt ready for every nick and slice,” wrote a critic in a glowing review for Vulture. “Gionfriddo builds in plenty of shadowy space for us to fear the worst — the psychological or literal carnage that could result from the scenario she’s configured — but she’s too interested in nuance to turn her characters into all-out monsters or feed them into a wood chipper.”
Gionfriddo remembers self-actualizing as a writer at Barnard College, where she majored in English and found creative guidance in professors like Elizabeth Dalton and Maire Jaanus. One of her most vivid college memories involved putting together a soap opera about student life alongside a handful of fellow Barnard and Columbia students for public access television.
“I remember people laughing at some of the things I wrote,” she recalled. “And I hadn’t intended for them to be funny. It was a revelation.”
Through her Centennial Scholarship (now known as the Barbara Silver Horowitz ’55 Scholars of Distinction Program), Gionfriddo interned at Primary Stages, an Off-Broadway theater, which culminated in the first draft of her first play. A playwright who was working with the theater at the time encouraged her to look into graduate programs, pointing her towards Brown University, where she went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts.
Her career has included a number of raw, contemplative comedies met with critical success, from After Ashley in 2004 to Can You Forgive Her? in 2016. Rapture, Blister, Burn, an exploration of gender politics in middle age, earned Gionfriddo her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama nomination in 2013.
Gionfriddo began talks with Second Stage, the company that produced Becky Shaw’s first run in 2008, about a revival — this time on Broadway — a few years ago. The founding mission of the company is to produce second stagings of important American plays for new audiences, and Becky Shaw, a runaway success in the early aughts, was an intuitive choice to bring back.
Recently, Gionfriddo came to the realization that many of the writers she admires produced work out of the torment of the AIDS crisis. Christopher Durang, Nicky Silver, Paula Vogel: Their writing was comedic, to be sure, but also undeniably dark, containing an “almost nasty sense of humor.” Becky Shaw is dark, too — and that’s part of the appeal.
“I find that these kinds of plays aren’t really being written anymore,” said Gionfriddo, who attended opening night with her teenage daughter. “I think there’s a timidity to what people are creating right now. There is a desire to go gently. This is a play that doesn’t go gently.”
Becky Shaw runs through June 14, 2026 at the Hayes Theater in Manhattan. The 79th Tony Awards are scheduled to take place on June 7, 2026 at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on CBS.