Interviews preceding the opening of Becky Shaw at Second Stage confirm Simon Saltzman's above assumption that the resemblance between the title character of Gina Gionfriddo’s play and the anti-heroine of Thackeray’s epic novel Vanity Fair is indeed purely and presumably intentional. Thackeray's sprawling work with its huge cast of characters is notoriously hard to adapt, but that hasn't prevented fans of the novel from trying.

Four silent film versions were produced between 1911 and 1923. Myrna Loy starred in the first sound film in 1932. Miriam Hopkins tackled the role three years later (in the first ever Technicolor film). The most recent film Becky Sharp was Reese Witherspoon. Of the TV miniseries the one closest to the book was the 1987 version starring Eve Matheson which is available for instant viewing at Netflix.

Unlike the page to stage adapters, novelist Margaret Mitchell created her own version of a novel dominated by a scrappy Becky Sharp-ish woman who, despite her girlish fiddle-de-dees, was not one to be kept from living life to the fullest, no matter what her economic and social circumstances. And as Gone With the Wind's Scarlett O'Hara parallelled Becky Sharp, so the virtuous Melanie Wilkes echoed Becky's friend, Amelia Sedley. Instead of using the Napoleonic war as background, Mitchell's story was drawn on a Civil War canvas.

While literary historians have identified Vanity Fair as the obvious inspiration for Gone With the Wind, the point-counter-point relationships between two quite different women has been a popular plot device. Female characters unwilling to live life according to their social circumstances and willing to do anything to realize their ambition have often been likened to Becky Sharp (think Hedda Gabler and Eve Harrington).

This brings us to Ms. Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw. For Vanity Fair fans that name instantly evokes Thackeray's Becky, in my case, so much so that I accidentally wrote Becky Sharp in my calendar. Since Thackeray penned his novel not just to entertain but to reveal the foibles of the English upper classes and perhaps leave readers to contemplate on their own place in this greed and deceit filled society, Gionfriddo's choice for her Becky's surname not only makes for a natural link to Sharp but also conujures up the name of George Bernard Shaw, another socially conscious playwright —giving the title something of a sly double literary edge.

Ms. Gionfriddo's characters display distinctly NOW style foibles. Put them in period costumes and wigs, and they're not all that different from the puppets in the Vanity Fair performance used to frame the novel. That said, the implied connection to its literary ancestor is basically an attention-getting conceit. However, it's fun to consider the connections to the novel as well as the differences.

Becky Shaw does turn out to be as manipulative and bent on satisfying her own needs as Becky Sharp. However, Becky's surname is aptly symbolic. She is sharp of wit and her wiles are those of a strong, assertive female (to wit, the very first scene has Becky throwing a book at the schoolmistress she despises). Becky Shaw, on the other hand, is older and more of an inept screw-up. She's thirty-five which, as shows like Seinfeld proved, is today's extended twenty-one. Having failed at everything (wonder of wonder in today's high tech world, she doesn't even have a cell phone prompting the man she's been fixed up with to ask "Is my date Amish?") her desperate desire to make a blind date turn into a relationship is something of a last ditch and decidedly awkward effort to keep from falling between the cracks of life in the lane reserved for those classified as losers.

Simon's wondering about what to make of a play without a single character to root for actually points to Becky Shaw's closest resemblance to Vanity Fair. Thackeray's subtitle was "A Novel Without a Hero" and thus his characters reflected his opinion of people as being for the most part "abominably foolish and selfish" The description certainly fits Becky Shaw and company. On the other hand, Simon's appreciation of Gionfriddo's ability to write fast, funny dialogue targets its major and most welcome difference. Thackeray's style was long-winded and distinctly of its era. It thus takes a commitment by anyone reading Vanity Fair today to be won over to its enduring appeal and strengths. There's nothing dated or slow to get into about Gionfriddo's writing which has been honed by years with TV's Law & Order franchise.

Vanity Fair mavens might also recognize other traces of the main events and players in Becky Shaw: Though the novel has been much praised for its superb account of the civilian experience of the battle of Waterloo, the author's focus was on the society of that period. Our current war in Iraq plays a much more minor role in Becky Shaw but it's not overlooked in the contemporary reference studded dialogue. The considerably slimmed down estate of the recently deceased father Suzanna grieves for, and who his wife Susan has so quickly replaced with a lover, likens the family to the Sedley family's struggled with diminished wealth. Suzanna's bleeding hearts husband Andrew might be seen by some as an heir to the novel's most morally upstanding character, Dobbins. Stretch the comparisons a bit more, and Susan's boy toy, the never seen Lester, and Becky's aborted romances with black boyfriends, can be viewed as echoing Thackery's unmasking of class cnobbery.

In case Becky Shaw and these notes whet your appetite, to read or re-read Thackery's masterpiece, it's yours to download for free at either http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/51/94/frameset.html or http://www.bartleby.com/305/ -- or, if you own an Amazon Kindle, you can download it for about a buck.