Alex Désert and Lodric D. Collins — Photo by Cody Williams
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Trio Vision and the James Twins at the Odyssey
Thru Aug. 31
When first produced on Broadway in 2011, The Motherf**ker with the Hat caused quite a stir, garnering several Tony nominations, including one for Best Play. But the current production at the Odyssey shows its fault lines in stark relief.
Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’s dire yet almost farcically comedic exploration of addiction places its morally bankrupt characters on the tectonically-shifting sands of their own bad choices.
Newly released from prison, Jackie (Lodric D. Collins) is battling his addiction with the help of his friend and AA sponsor, Ralph (Alex Désert). A rudderless and volatile creature of impulse, Jackie is staying with his longtime girlfriend, Veronica (Jordan Marinov), a hairdresser who is still an active user — a situation Ralph warns will undermine Jackie’s sobriety. Fifteen years sober, Ralph pontificates portentously to Jackie about recovery — but although drink may no longer be his failing, he is still a user, if not of alcohol, than of people.
Jackie is besotted with Veronica, his sweetheart since the 8th grade. So when he finds a man’s hat in her apartment and sniffs out the aroma of a recent sexual encounter on her bed, he unravels. Believing that the hat belongs to another tenant in the building, he procures a gun, throws the hat onto the floor of the man’s apartment, and shoots it — a parole violation that will ultimately send him back upstate for another stretch.
It’s clear that Guirgis’s writing style has mellowed through the years, as evidenced by his 2015 Pulitzer winner, Between Riverside and Crazy, a gently character-driven piece about embattled characters in crisis. However, Motherf**er comes across as randomly motivated and self-consciously offensive. Call it stream-of-consciousness unpleasantness. The characters are uniformly disagreeable, exploiting and betraying one another at the drop of a motherf**er’s hat. And by the play’s curiously flat ending, nothing has been learned and little has changed.
It’s arguable whether a hint of redemption would palliate the play’s ethical bleakness, and that’s not really the playwright’s mandate. But the characters here are so relentlessly crummy that we feel uncomfortably trapped in their dysfunction.
It doesn’t help that director Jolie Oliver’s logy pacing stretches things out to almost two and a half hours, instead of the 90 or so minutes it should actually run. The dialogue should be frantic and staccato, delivered at a breakneck pace, instead of being mulled over with deliberation. Also, the staging includes mind-bogglingly interruptive scene changes. A large team hustles the between-scenes shifts, much to their credit. But the set itself, which includes a lot of folderol, from side tables to bed sheets to makeup tables, could and should have been streamlined. Instead of the complete and frequent shifts between scenes, a more minimal, flexible design could have sufficed to suggest the different locales.
That said, the performers, which include Oliver as Ralph’s stridently unhappy wife and Carlos Moreno, Jr. as Jackie’s flamboyant cousin, are uniformly outstanding. They commit fully to their flawed material, striving heroically to clarify the intent behind their characters’ arbitrary motivations. Their conviction gives the production its pulse, even when the play itself resists redemption.
A visiting production at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. Thur.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. thru Aug. 31. https://www.tmfwth.com Running time: two hours and 15 minutes with an intermission.
