All About barebones’ New Production
heartfelt, surprising, and insightful…
Some motherf**ker who’s f**king Jackie’s girlfriend Veronica (Ruth Gamble) has left his f**king hat behind, and Jackie (Patrick Jordan) wants to know: who’s the motherf**ker with the hat? That quick summary of the play’s inciting incident tells you just about everything you need to know about the language and tone of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s sharp, engaging, and very funny play The Motherf**ker with the Hat; where the play goes from there, however, is far more heartfelt, surprising, and insightful than the jealous-hothead-boyfriend-romcom setup would ever lead you to believe. Jackie, you see, is trying to turn his life around: recently released from jail, where he spent time on drug charges, he’s in a twelve-step program and taking his sobriety one day at a time. Veronica, his girlfriend since eighth grade, is about as far from rehab as a person can get, but Jackie is as addicted to her as she is to the various substances she abuses. After discovering the hat in his apartment, Jackie seeks advice from his AA sponsor, Ralph D. (Edwin Lee Gibson), who seems to bear his own relationship cross in the form of Victoria (Daina Michelle Griffith), his bitchy harridan of a wife. Impatient with Ralph’s anodyne AA platitudes, Jackie takes desperate, parole-violating measures that lead him to seek help from his cousin Julio (Leandro Cano) to hide a gun. As the events of the play unfold, so do a series of revelations and betrayals that throw Jackie further off balance until, eventually, by the bittersweet ending, he starts to find his inner equilibrium.