Stephen Adly Guirgis’s plays are flush with unlikely coming of age stories, illuminating an underclass struggling to redefine itself. Called “the poet laureate of the angry” by The New York Times, Guirgis’s characters’ pride, delusion, and self-pity—derived from a life perched on societal edge—are their most insurmountable obstacles. “Guirgis’s people are mired neck deep in who they can’t stop being, who they can’t get away from, that is, themselves,” writes New Dramatists Artistic Director Todd London. “They are, to borrow his lingo, the stuckest motherfuckers around.”
Much has been made of this language, with the asterisk-inducing title of this play and the verbal combat within, but Guirgis maintains, “I’m not like a champion of profanity. I write what I hear, and the characters that I write, that’s how they talk…in between the adjectives and modifiers that are colorful, they also say things that are pretty interesting, pretty human, and pretty funny.” The play’s uncensored, full-blooded individuals populate a multiethnic, mixed-income, urban blue collar world, but the struggles they face as they strive for responsibility, acceptance, and love are universal.
For all its explosive bravado, The Motherfucker with the Hat is a thoughtful examination of the duality of identity: how do we negotiate our twin capacities for love and deception, compassion and narcissism, integrity and amorality? As Jackie’s world unravels, he remarks, “Funny how people can be more than one thing—ain’t it?” This observation extends to the experience of the play itself: Guirgis’s complex characters come into impassioned confrontation with each other and themselves, challenging his audiences’ assumptions and inciting laughter of both amusement and recognition.
—Lauren Halvorsen