The Motherfucker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Capital T Theatre, August 8 - 31, 2013 (Review No. 2)

Indigo Rael (poster: 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 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.

Indigo Rael, J. Ben Wolfe (photo: Capital T. Theatre)

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 one of 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.


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