Review: The Motherfucker with the Hat by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs

Let's get right down to that title.  The expletive noun is one of the most offensive combinations in the English language, and many of us get a sharp visceral twinge seeing it used in the title of Guirgis's play.  The noun and variants of its subsidiary combinant verb are also among the most common oral expressions in the English language, especially in American parlance.

Words are powerful, especially when they evoke taboos.  Publications and individuals may try to exorcise personal responsibility for using them -- or even knowing them -- by altering them into recognizable euphemisms.  MoFo, used in a recent Tweet by an admired young Austin director, probably percolated up from American ghettos of poverty.   Fug was foisted upon Norman Mailer's 1949 The Naked and the Dead by editors at Andre Deutsch's Allen Wingate press.  The doughty men and women of the television series Battlestar Galactica were allowed to say frack. One happy chant of a star marching band of a high school in coastal Virginia has long been "We don't drink! Nor smoke! Norfolk! Norfolk!"

Playwright Guirgis, a successful playwright and screenwriter, probably intended to provoke with that title, one that still can't be mentioned in broadcasts without a beep or printed in most general-circulation publications without a couple of asterisks applied like pasties on a pole dancer's most prominent delights.

But this story takes place entirely within the hard pressed underclass of an outlying borough of New York City.  The characters struggle with alcoholism, drugs, crime and one another, and the expletives and taboo speech authenticate the milieu for us. If you're bothered by the title on the poster, give this one a miss, because that's the language used throughout the play by the protagonist and others.  Their coarse speech assumes a music and rhythm of its own; one becomes inured to the literal meaning of the obscenities.  Guirgis conveys intensely complex meanings and feelings in that impoverished speech.

People talk like that.  Not just those in the underclass, of course -- those words are probably applied with a shade more imagination in many a locker room across the country, and I recall the slight uneasiness I experienced when I heard my grown children regularly using the "f-word" (yet another euphemism) without a trace of self-consciousness.

Mark Pickell's Capital T company and their sponsor, Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre, have a sharply defined taste for the type of theatre commonly termed edgy or dark. For lack of a better classification, many a reviewer would probably say they're dealing in black humor. These are stories with cynical twists, peopled with characters that are sharply drawn and often obsessive.  We thank God that we don't have their flaws.

Capital T uses powerfully accomplished actors and technical artists, and their delivery of these dramas never fails to grip the audience. The title and the language of this piece may be abhorrent to you, but this work is not in any way the flailing of undeveloped or malevolent minds.  If anything, the artistic aim here is very close to that of the French artists of the late 19th century who aimed to 'épater les bourgeois,' as Charles Baudelaire is reported to have remarked -- 'to scandalize the bourgeois population.'  Or, today, maybe, 'to blow away the motherfucking dumb-ass middle class.'

Okay, I know -- they've got me wound up here.   With The MF (another euphemism) with the Hat, Capital T tells a vivid story with believable characters and makes us care very deeply about them.  That is no easy achievement in this particular genre of dramatic art.  For example, I was impressed by Cap T's assertive staging of Killer Joe by Tracy Letts back in 2009, but I unhappily concluded that Letts's script was "manipulative, sardonic and demeaning both to men and to women." It was, in a word, obscene.

In contrast, and despite the insistent use of spoken obscenities, Guirgis's text is not in the least obscene. He takes his characters seriously.  Jacky, the protagonist portrayed by J. Ben Wolfe, is a small-time criminal, just returning on parole from an upstate prison where he served time for dealing narcotics. He's coming back to the neighborhood because he really has no other place to go. Jackie shacks up again with his girlfriend Veronica, a nervous and unhappy cocaine addict (Indigo Rael, memorably intense, long, lean and intensely feminine). 

Jackie's 'sponsor,' Ralph (Aaron Alexander), ten years into his own one-day-at-a-time AA program, drove up every month with Veronica to visit Jacky. We hear Ralph warn Jacky that he has to start taking responsibility for his own actions, keep clean, comply with the terms of his parole, and break out of the dead-end relationship with his addicted girlfriend. Aaron Alexander as Ralph is matter-of-fact and magnificently in control of himself mentally and physically. He's Jacky's only example of behavior that might keep him out of the slammer.

Despite any labels to the contrary you might have seen, this production of The MF with the Hat is not a comedy.  Capital T's publicity calls it "fast and uproarious" and offers "hysterical and irreverent" as a pull quote from the New Yorker. They do provide Terry Teachout's first-paragraph punch in the Wall Street Journal , an apt and carefully crafted comment: "It's tight, smart and splendidly well-made, a tough-minded, unromantically romantic comedy that keeps you laughing, then sends you home thinking." 

You could, I think, play this situation for laughs, and perhaps that's what they did in the 2011 Broadway production.  For example, Guirgis introduces the deliciously comic character Cousin Julio in the second act, an effeminate but married physical culturalist who reluctantly helps Jackie hide a gun that was recently smoking. Rommel Sulit captures the Puerto Rican accent, Julio's outrageous posturing and the intonations with uncanny mimicry. But even Julio, so alien that he might have come down from a UFO, has some sharp things to tell Jackie and some memories that throw their apparently disaffected relationship into sharp relief.  (Jude Hickey played Cousin Julio on opening weekend.)

The playing space at the Hyde Park Theatre is an intimate one, with fewer than a hundred seats, all of them filled last Friday evening. The small stage is visibly divided between Veronica's apartment on stage right and Ralph's on stage left, with the table at center stage serving as needed for each. The third locale is that of Cousin Julio, and director Carrie Klypchak adroitly solves that blocking challenge by having Julio speak and enter from offstage behind the audience, so that the center stage table is absorbed into his world.

The drama's key theme is in fact an inquiry: who can you trust? (Not 'whom' can you trust - forgeddaboutit! ). Jackie's disappointments mount; he pushes away other characters, seeks support and counsel, resists the booze and the chemicals, tries to adhere to an unspoken code of honor, tries to decide for himself, tries to master the beast within. Wolfe's strength and subtlety in this role never give us the slightest reason to doubt Jackie's conflicts or to patronize him. The conclusion of the action is logical, very nearly inevitable, and arises directly from Jackie's inner flaws -- qualities and outcome that correspond very closely to the Aristotelian criteria for tragedy.

It's no downer, however. Yes, when one emerges from the theatre, for a time one is still in Jackie's world of high walls, dead ends and imminent consequences.  But after the gripping evening we've spent with him and the rest of the cast, Guirgis and Capital T leave us a space for hope for our Jackie.

Review by Jeff Davis at www.austin.broadwayworld.com,  August 16

EXTRAS

AustinLiveTheatre Review by Dr. David Glen Robinson, August 20

Capital T Theatre interview with director Carrie Klypchak, August 21

Click to view program for The Motherfucker with the Hat by Capital T Theatre

The Motherfucker with the Hat
by Stephan Adly Guirgis
Capital T Theatre