Sharp Claws at “Becky Shaw” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball”

Still, what distinguishes Gionfriddo is not her ear for cruelty but her ability to see beyond it, and to shift the prism of audience sympathy, in tiny increments. This tension is intensified by Trip Cullman’s precise staging, which is smartly paced, down to the indie-sleaze anthems, such as “Zero,” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that mark each set change. The costumes, by Kaye Voyce, are almost alarmingly on target, from Becky’s try-hard dress to Andrew’s fuzzy orange cardigan. Once in a while, black flats compress the space, framing a single character’s face, bathed in a bleaching white light, as if their vulnerabilities were being scanned by an MRI. Even David Zinn’s set includes a punch line: the cramped quarters feel minimalist, but they pay off in the second act, with a sudden revelation about the way some people get to live.

The cast is terrific, particularly Brewer, whose Becky, an ancestor of Thackeray’s social climber, reminded me of the Ben Folds song “Fragile,” about an emotional terrorist full of excuses: “It’s, like, ‘Crash, boom, oops . . . did I break that, too?’ ” Emond, as Suzanna’s hypercritical mother, puts an Olympic-level spin on her withering observations. Ball, that hot doctor on “The Pitt,” nails the way decency can conceal secret trapdoors; Patten, as Suzanna, captures the flop sweat of a woman falling, bit by bit, below her own moral standards.

But the engine driving the production is Ehrenreich’s magnetic performance as Max, the sort of character who, in many other stories and lots of nineteen-eighties sex comedies, would be the villain. With his subdued growl, rat-a-tat standup-comic delivery, and air of couched melancholy, Ehrenreich lends a peculiar moral weight to Max, a master puppeteer tangled up in his own strings. He’s a caustic know-it-all, but, the more we learn about him, the more defensible, and even ethical, his Realpolitik becomes. However callous his words are, he radiates turbulent emotion: whenever someone steps close to him, a Geiger counter starts crackling, as if intimacy itself had a half-life.

There’s a wonderful moment early in the play when Ehrenreich is left alone onstage, with a look of such ragged disorientation and abandonment, of little-boy distress, that it lingers, later, even when Max is at his most cutting, when he seems to be doing “American Psycho” cosplay. It’s the quality that distinguishes Gionfriddo’s play from a brittle farce—its willingness to recognize failed love as something bigger than a player losing a game, an oceanic force roiling beneath the script’s surface nastiness. After laughing my head off all evening, there was a moment, just before the night ended, when my eyes teared up. That, too, felt like the real thing.

Across the street from “Becky Shaw,” there’s another audience going crazy with joy, at “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (at the Broadhurst), a delirious revival grounded in what may be the greatest dramaturgical insight in musical-comedy history. The material its creators are messing with is, of course, “Cats,” the much mocked British mega-musical that dominated Broadway from 1982 through the turn of the century, infuriating haters of Andrew Lloyd Webber, theatrical bombast, and narrative incoherence. Based, pretty bizarrely, on some light verse by T. S. Eliot, the original production, with its treacly pop-rock score, was set inside a junk yard full of touchy-feely showoffs in kitten ears, competing to reach the Heaviside Layer, a celestial MacGuffin. It made tons of money and no sense.

Two decades later, in 2019, the I.P. flared back up again, like shingles. That January, the show sparked a pair of rude TV satires, first, on the musical-mad series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” where vagina metaphors alternate with wisecracks about “Cats” ruining Broadway, and then, two weeks later, on the sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” with a hilarious plot in which the thirsty actor Titus Andromedon crashes the production as the made-up cat Frumbumbly. Backstage, he realizes that he’s cracked the show’s secret code: the entire thing is and always has been pure, improvised nonsense—and anyone who can babble convincingly enough can join the ensemble. That December, a hideous movie adaptation seemed to confirm that view of “Cats,” by congealing any lingering charm beneath layers of “digital fur technology.”