The Motherfucker with the Hat – Darlinghurst Theatre Company

Overview

Workhorse Theatre Company’s The Motherfucker with the Hat shows human love at its dirtiest, and human savagery at its purest.

Set in a lower class New York neighbourhood, where addiction is the only respite from the rough reality of the everyday, Jackie (Troy Harrison) completes his prison sentence and tries desperately to return to the straight-and-narrow. He’s hindered by the coke-using, expletive-slinging love of his life, Veronica (Zoe Trilsbach).

Just when he finds employment and life is looking up, Jackie finds another man’s hat in Veronica’s apartment. The play follows the life-churning combo of love, jealousy and betrayal after the discovery of the offending headwear.

Writer Stephen Adly Guirgis provides a phenomenally fun script, which the five actors in the Darlinghurst Theatre Company production clearly relish. Trilsbach handles the text best, with a raw, resonant voice that fires words like gunshots. A few Aussie accents peeked through the slack-jawed, working-class Bronx accents, which made me wonder if the foreign accents were entirely necessary. Surely director Adam Cook decided the text was so Yonkers it needed the accents, but with the amount of imported drama on our stages, an exaggerated or faulty accent can create caricature. It’s initially harder to relate this play’s themes to our Australian context.

Yet, the themes are there for the applying — starting with the focus on addiction and recovery. I found myself contemplating the Aussie drinking culture, where functional alcoholism is allowed to breed freely. Adly Guirgis turns the AA catchcry “one day at a time” on its head, causing us to ask if adulthood means simply using each other for self-interested gains. Was the time for love and friendship during childhood, and long gone?

The biggest flaw in this production is the scenic transitions. There is a blackout and full set change between every scene, which gets tedious and requires five actors and two stagehands to manoeuvre multiple pieces of furniture. The play would be much shorter, more engaging and more efficient with a pared-back set. One begins to wonder if they are simply showing off their resources or assume their audience is a bit silly.

Do go to The Motherfucker for an intelligent and morally challenging script. Just have patience (and dinner beforehand) to stay mentally alert during the scene changes.