Fran Kranz

A Bride’s Best Friends for Never

Imbibe gently, if at all, before attending “Bachelorette,” the sensational new comedy by Leslye Headland set during a toxic party on the eve of a swanky Manhattan wedding. Bottles of bubbly are consumed with breathtaking dispatch by pretty young things in party dresses in this scarifying tale of mean-girl malice and generational malaise. Even confirmed teetotalers may emerge from the McGinn/Cazale Theater, where the play opened on Monday night, feeling the urge to slither into a cab and check into rehab.

And alcohol is just the appetizer. Once these dedicated hedonists really get going, cocaine is consumed in cotton-candy quantities; the air is fogged with pot smoke; and the rattle of little pills in plastic vials adds percussion to the woozy music of gossip about who’s fat, who’s cute and who’s sleeping with whom.

But the hangover by proxy you may acquire is a fair price to pay for the satisfactions of this vivid and entertaining play, as witheringly funny as it is bitterly sad. The central characters in this Second Stage Theater production, three postcollegiate young women and the two young men they pick up, are observed with equal parts savagery and sympathy. Endearing or pathetic one moment, reprehensible the next, they may be familiar: marginally more grown-up versions of the spoiled youngsters from any number of youth-aimed movies and television shows. But as written with stiletto-sharp wit by Ms. Headland, they are almost embarrassingly compelling, and expertly played by a cast of gifted actors under the pitch-perfect direction of Trip Cullman.

I should add that they can be spectacularly vulgar too. Theatergoers with sensibilities not attuned to the frank discussion of sex among the hookup generation should be forewarned. In a particularly outlandish passage, the girls dissect the subject of oral sex as if blandly comparing different kinds of manicures, in detail that would bring a strong blush to the cheeks of that elder stateswoman of dirty talking, Samantha Jones of “Sex and the City.”

And yet for all their outrageousness and puerile dissipation, Ms. Headland’s heedless youngsters are also deeply and disturbingly real. With an unsparing clarity, “Bachelorette” pulls back the curtain on the unseemly after-party that follows once the fun of being young, comfortable and playfully wasted begins to bleed into a life of stunted drifting, frustration and wanton self-destruction.

The play’s slender plot, and its title, for that matter, exploit the hen-party appeal that was a prime factor in the success of that aforementioned HBO series. The social milieu is a rung or two below the over-the-top privilege of “Gossip Girl,” another hip cultural brand that the play incidentally evokes in its depiction of the lacerating tongues of seemingly sweet New Yorkers.

Regan (Tracee Chimo), the ringleader of the group, is the nominal occupant of the plush hotel suite in which the play takes place. Tomorrow she’s doing maid-of-honor duties at the wedding of her friend Becky (Carmen M. Herlihy). Tonight she has invited her friends Katie (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Gena (Katherine Waterston) to come by for an impromptu party in the room Becky’s paid for.

The bride-to-be is absent, spending the night with her fiancé. This is fortunate, since Katie and Gena have fallen out with their former friend. Neither has been invited to the wedding, and their acid repartee on the subject of Becky’s weight suggests at least one reason for the omission.

“Fat people are so easy to hate,” the sample-sized Katie says in between healthy chugs of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

Regan is actually the last to arrive, having spent the afternoon getting high with some guys she picked up who are now circling the hotel, looking for parking. Pretty and poised, she is ostensibly the most successful of the group, with her soon-to-be-M.D. boyfriend, her Princeton degree and her job at a hospital.

But there’s a chilly glint in those perfectly made-up eyes, and the ease with which Regan joins in the trash talk about Becky suggests that serious frustration fuels her petulant whining about the improbability of her less obviously marketable friend getting married before she does.

Ms. Chimo, so superb as the mousy nerd in Annie Baker’s “Circle Mirror Transformation,” proves equally terrific as this cold, confident but emotionally brittle manipulator. The tone in which Regan corrects Katie’s misapprehension about her job working with children at the hospital could send a chill down anyone’s spine.

“They’re not retarded, they have cancer,” she says with an affronted sneer, as if Katie had just accused her of toting around a knockoff Balenciaga bag. In a catfight between Ms. Chimo’s Regan and her Shakespearean namesake, I’d place my money on the contemporary version.

Ms. Waterston’s Gena, who is eager to get the party going but the first to try to rein things in when it starts reeling out of control, grows dithery and confused as the joshing bitchery becomes more ferocious. Ms. Waterston effectively transmits the natural sympathy beneath the snarky posing, which kicks into gear when Katie and Regan drag Becky’s wedding dress from the closet and threaten to set it on fire. (Incidentally, Ms. Waterston delivers the flat-out funniest line of the show, a cellphone-related joke that is itself worth the price of admission.)

The appalling mockery of this amply sized garment injects a sudden and unsettling note of pathos into the play. The absent subject of all those jokes is suddenly eerily present, and we become aware that the women engaging in all the catty chatter and the exultant imbibing may be more pathological than just obnoxious, dangerously desensitized to the effects of their behavior on both their friends and themselves. They are unable to feel anyone else’s pain, and unable to process their own.

Ms. Keenan-Bolger’s Katie, the former homecoming queen who has been doing her desperate best to keep the high school high going for way too long, becomes the unlikely cynosure of our sympathy. Although the cast is terrific across the board, Ms. Keenan-Bolger is outstanding. Katie may be gleefully mean, chronically dimwitted and the butt of some of Ms. Headland’s funniest gags, but Ms. Keenan-Bolger’s performance, boldly colored and emotionally raw, brings home the truth that even intellectually shallow people can possess frightening emotional depths.

“I want to kill myself,” this hyperactive party girl announces more than once during the idle cavorting. Since she’s just been jumping on the couch in her strappy shoes, it sounds like the histrionics of a woman who’s simply bored to distraction by her job at the mall. But the remark takes on a scary truth as the play proceeds, and Katie begins to unravel for real.

She does so in the arms of one of the men Regan picked up. Ms. Headland’s astute writing extends to the male characters in the play. Jeff, played with a subdued cockiness by Eddie Kaye Thomas, proves more than equal to the task of bringing the imperious Regan down a notch or two.

And Fran Kranz makes an impressive Off Broadway debut as the eternal wingman Joe, whose softheartedness is revealed in a moving monologue about his history of drug taking. Joe, too, does not perceive how his casual dedication to getting high is a symptom of a more profound alienation.

“Bachelorette,” which strides along confidently for most of its zippy 90-minute running time, suddenly breaks a heel in the homestretch. Searching to add some culminating ballast to the heady goings-on, Ms. Headland falters badly with a prolonged scene between Regan and Becky, who arrives to survey the devastation and clean up the mess.

Regan’s back-stabbing is perfectly plausible for a character of her type, but the viciousness with which she lashes out at her putative friend just doesn’t ring true. And the final tableau is borderline melodramatic. Still, given the excessive behavior of the characters she is writing about with such incisive humor and insight, perhaps Ms. Headland can be forgiven for indulging in a little excess herself.

BACHELORETTE

By Leslye Headland; directed by Trip Cullman; sets by Andromache Chalfant; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Ben Stanton; sound by Jill B C DuBoff; production stage manager, Lori Ann Zepp; stage manager, Rachel Motz; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; production manager, Jeff Wild; general manager, Don-Scott Cooper. An Uptown Series presentation by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director. At the McGinn/Cazale Theater, 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street; (212) 246-4422, 2st.com. Through Aug. 14. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Tracee Chimo (Regan), Carmen M. Herlihy (Becky), Celia Keenan-Bolger (Katie), Fran Kranz (Joe), Eddie Kaye Thomas (Jeff) and Katherine Waterston (Gena).