Stephen Adly Guirgis is garrulous. Three of the quintet of characters in his script THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT could, as they say, talk the leg off a table.
The play begins with a telephone conversation between Veronica and her mother, the drug addled daughter trying to persuade her addicted mother to attend rehab and ditch her fish headed fiancé. It’s a mouthfully funny monologue and indicative of the mastery of Guirgis’ ear.
Enter Jackie, Veronica’s childhood sweetheart bearing gifts and the good news that he has secured a job. All looks rosy for the couple until Jackie spies a hat on the table and deduces that some motherfucker with the hat has been fucking his Veronica.
On the brink of hitting her and the bottle, Jackie decamps to his AA sponsor, Ralph, who lives with his health food business partner and wife, recovering alcohol and substance abuser, Victoria.
And so, we have a scenario of two couples linked through substance addiction, their various dependencies, and how fidelity to their own selves and to the relationships they have formed is compromised.
In his program notes, director Adam Cook writes about an earlier incarnation of this production last year “within the liberating confines of the Tap Gallery.”
In the more expansive Eternity Theatre space, the intimacy and grunge inherent in the script is lost and makes for some unnecessary set changes. As slick as the movement of furniture aims to be, it is a tad disruptive to the fluency of the narrative, and the look of the dwellings resemble spacious suburban living rooms rather than tenement apartments of upper west side Manhattan.
That said, there’s no denying the energy, commitment and skill of the cast who clearly relish their characters.
Troy Harrison as Jackie is dexterous in dialogue and action, a simmering powder keg of testosterone and machismo.
Zoe Trilsbach’s Veronica is a feisty firecracker, a neutron nugget of self-destructiveness.
John Atkinson pitches Ralph as a proselytising pragmatist, an opportunist, a takes-one-to-know-one predator, truth and honesty finding safe harbour in his own hypocrisy.
Megan O’Connell’s Victoria, whose dreams of domestic bliss have disappeared into the abyss of domestic dross, delivers a nicely judged delicacy between brittle bravado and veneer-coated vulnerability.
Nigel Turner-Carroll is particularly good as the Jackie’s cousin, Julio. He is the moral conscience of the play, the least self-centred, yet overtly flamboyant character.
Having now seen THE MOTHER F**KER WITH THE HAT and THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT, Guirgis strikes me as a writer who fills his plays up with high octane gas, puts pedal to the metal, and drives till running on empty. He doesn’t know how, where and when to stop. Perhaps it’s a case of better to travel at velocity than to arrive.
THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT runs at the Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst until 19th October, 2014