By Gina Gionfriddo. Directed by David Mackay. Presented by Mitch and Murray Productions, at Studio 16 on Friday, November 22. Continues until December 7

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an evening of theatre that’s so thoroughly well realized. Gina Gionfriddo’s densely verbal script is wickedly smart, funny, and provocative. And, for this Vancouver production, director David Mackay has cast the show exquisitely: all the players in the five-member company are working at the top of their games.

In Becky Shaw, newlyweds Suzanna and Andrew set up a blind date between Becky, who’s temping at Andrew’s office, and Max, who was more or less adopted into Suzanna’s family when he was 10. Max is blunt to the point of cruelty: when Becky takes off her coat, he sees her dress and says, “You look like a birthday cake.” Becky, on the other hand, is fragile, at least on the surface—when she first arrives, she feels as skittish and desperate as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. But she is more than willing to use her weakness as a weapon. When Max and Becky’s date turns out badly—the evening involves a gun—the repercussions threaten Suzanna and Andrew’s marriage.

In Gionfriddo’s script, the ethical terrain is so uncertain it’s like the rolling ground of an earthquake. Max is a smart-talking asshole. When Andrew tells him that Becky doesn’t have a cellphone, he asks, “Is she Amish?” But Max also treads a persuasively rigorous—though narrow—moral line. He shuts down expressions of pain by saying that he doesn’t want other people’s troubles polluting his leisure time, but he is fiercely protective of those he loves and donates 10 percent of his income to causes he deems just. Max is also a quivering mess who’s never gotten over his own childhood wound: he’s in love with Suzanna, who is essentially his sister, and he’s disabled by it.

“Love is a happy byproduct of use,” Max tells Suzanna early on, and Gionfriddo regularly guts clichés about romance and attachment. Like Max, Suzanna’s mother Susan is a frosty character who cuts through the crap. When Suzanna’s marriage to Andrew gets shaky, she advises against expecting intimacy. It’s like those TV commercials for cleaners that show you close-ups of germs, Susan explains, “If you look hard enough at anything or anyone, you will be revolted by them.”

Moya O’Connell’s Becky is as alluring and dangerous as a broken glass ornament; Becky’s intelligence is obvious, but she is an unmoored narcissist. Aaron Craven’s Max is a tightly wound bundle of intelligence, arrogance, and pain. And Craven’s rapid-fire delivery helps to realize the character’s comic potential. Andrew could come across as irredeemably wet—the character cries at porn—but, using humour, Charlie Gallant finds depth and charm. Meghan Gardiner’s Suzanna is at once sophisticated and lost, while Marilyn Norry’s Susan is a formidable tower of reason and self-indulgence.

At times, Becky’s neuroticism and Max’s belligerence get repetitive. But Becky Shaw spanked my synapses and I’m grateful.