The first scene of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker With the Hat is fast, flashy, and tremendously assured. A tough-cookie Nuyorican named Veronica is straightening up her crummy residential-hotel studio and taking occasional snorts of a white powder as she talks to her hard-drinking mother by phone. She wants mom to drop her current boyfriend, a “fuckin’ big-time loser with a head like a actual fuckin’ fish!” “Ma, when you see him tonight: Take a moment. Take a breath,” Veronica counsels. “Take a real good look and just ax yourself in all honesty—’Do I wanna fuck him—or fry him up with a little adobo and paprika. . . ?’”
I could quote this stuff all day. The slang. The sly detail. The prosody—especially the rhythms, punctuated by hard-sound repetitions (“pie” and “place,” “like” and “talk”). Not to mention the heartbreaking comedy of two fuckups trying hard not to fuck up yet again, even though fucking up holds an intense allure for both of them. And then there’s the mechanics of Guirgis’s storytelling. Boom, boom, boom: he lays out what we need to know and, just as importantly, what we don’t and wish we did—like, what’s the real story behind that hat? It’s absolutely masterful.
Through 3/3: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Wed 2/6-2/20, 2 and 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$86
