The Motherfucker With the Hat—Stephen Adly Guirgis Cusses His Way Onto Broadway

Noted word plays noted theater district

A A A Comments (1) By Alexis Soloski Wednesday, Apr 20 2011

Perhaps the chief delight of The Motherfucker With the Hat—Stephen Adly Guirgis's excitable, profane, somewhat thin Broadway debut—lies in the struggle of various media outlets to convey its title, substituting MF, Motherf**ker, or, in the case of the Times, a long, tantalizing blank.

Joan Marcus

Some Midtown invective for you.

Details

The Motherfucker With the Hat
By Stephen Adly Guirgis
Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th Street
212-239-6200, themfwiththehat.com

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As in past plays, Guirgis has a high time with lowlife, and Motherfucker centers around a recent parolee, Jackie (Bobby Cannavale, loutish and visceral), and his AA sponsor, Ralph D. (Chris Rock, limited but cannily cast). Jackie walks the sober straight-and-narrow right up until he finds a hat in his apartment and suspects his girlfriend, Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), of infidelity. Then he descends into a welter of substance abuse and unwelcome ethical conundrums.

The five-member cast, which includes an underutilized Annabella Sciorra and the delightful Yul Vazquez, often threaten to overact, but Anna D. Shapiro directs the showboating on an even keel. At the performance I attended, the shouting, fistfights, and cheerfully vulgar monologues kept the action churning, until a scenery glitch forced a halt and all that manic energy drained away. That disruption in pacing revealed the slightness of the play. Guirgis's fine joking and engaging bluster—all that sound and filthy fury—signifies not fucking much.

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