Playwright: Gina Gionfriddo. At: Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St. Phone: 312-943-8722;$25-$30. Runs through: Nov. 6
Folk wisdom holds that every cripple eventually finds his/her crutch and vice-versa. The Slater family of North Carolina’s history is a chronicle of the pragmatically hard-hearted protecting the interests of the generously weak-willed. The latest case study is Miss Susanna Slater and her foster brother, Max—the latter of whom dispenses tough-love solace to the former as she mourns the death of her father and her mother’s prompt appropriation of a ne’er-do-well lover. Six months later, Susanna is married to a husband whose compulsive nurturing extends to introducing an insecure female co-worker—the Becky Shaw giving the play its title—to bachelor Max. When this stranger turns out to combine the vulnerability of a wilting flower with the obstinacy of a creeping vine, the question of what to do with this needy stray forces them all to examine the motives for their behavior.
The play’s external action may be set in New England, specifically the Boston-Providence hub near Brown University, but Gina Gionfriddo’s universe is steeped in deep-south gothic as thick as Spanish moss. In addition to the late Mr. Slater perhaps having engaged in a homosexual relationship with his business partner, Max’s deceased mother was abandoned by his drunken-jailbird father—a fate Susanna fears the widow Slater’s choice of paramour will resurrect, her foreboding possibly engendered by guilt over having once, herself, slept with her half-sibling. The problem is not filial pain of, literally, mythical proportions, however, but that the sufferers refuse to heal, the better to enjoy their therapyspeak-fueled crises. It finally falls to the clan matriarch, whose physical disability—multiple sclerosis—has narrowed her priorities, to set things to rights.
This is enough interpersonal dynamic to fuel a half-dozen plays, but Gionfriddo appears undecided as to which one she wanted to write. On one level, our story is a screwball tragedy in the Beth Henley mode. On another, it’s an exploration of self-styled victims and their enablers, and on a third, a portrait of a psychological parasite preying on the credulously co-dependent. Under Damon Kiely’s likewise ambivalent direction, a cast of Red Orchid stalwarts, led by the redoubtable Lance Baker and Jennifer Engstrom, endow their nebulous personae with great gobs of panache, but cannot rescue a premise that promises more than it ultimately delivers.