"The Motherf**ker With The Hat' on Broadway

The title of Stephen Adly Guirgis's new play— now known as The Asterisk with the Hat— is unprintable in any newspaper or on any marquee. If you've followed Guirgis's work for years, as I have, the unprintable language won't surprise you. But it's indeed surprising to find Guirgis— the lurking, grungy street prince of Off-Broadway— on Broadway.

One of my favorite lines from my favorite Guirgis play, Our Lady of 121st Street, is one character's response to the offer of a drink: "You wanna drink, Vic? A little nip? Take the edge off?" Vic replies, "I prefer to keep my edge on, pal." Somebody offered Guirgis not a drink but a Big Broadway Production starring a Big Celebrity. He shudda kept his edge on.

Guirgis knows street talk and can write dialogue of astonishingly funny mad-dog ferocity. But somebody has to speak that dialogue onstage, and Chris Rock, the crass standup comedy star (his films include I Think I Love My Wife, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Lethal Weapon 4) isn't the actor to do it.

Unfortunately, Rock plays a major role in Hat. Although the brilliant, full-throated, intense work of Bobby Cannavale redeems the show, it's not enough, even with the fierce backup of his fellow LAByrinth players Elizabeth Rodriguez, and Yul Vazquez.

Indiscriminate sex

The plot is thin and repetitious: Jackie (Cannavale) and Veronica (Rodriguez) have been crazy in love since eighth grade, but now that he's clean and sober and out of prison, he has to deal with her continuing addictions— including indiscriminate sex with, among others, the motherfucker with the hat.

Said hat, being left on the table, catches Jackie's eye. Their passionate fights are sensational. Veronica, a speed-talking sexy cokehead tries to make peace with Jackie:

"Look, let's just go there, to the pie place, and we'll have, like, some pie, and we'll just, like, talk, or not even talk, we'll just eat pie first and be…. I'm willing to put the ghetto on hold and eat some fuckin' pie with you, if you're willing to entertain the notion that you're a fuckin' retard ex-con who almost blew it cuz you got an imagination like—I dunno—Dr. Fuckin' Seuss an' shit. OK?"

Mayhem and heartbreak subsequently ensue, during which Ralph (Rock), Jackie's AA sponsor, will deliver many platitude-filled speeches, urging his "sponsee" to "journal." Ralph may have sanctimoniously kicked his own habits, but he has also kicked ethics and morality.

Oddly racist

It's an oddly racist result of the casting that Ralph is the only African-American in the group; the other men, who are Hispanic, live by a "code" of honor that Ralph violates with self-serving impunity. Most honorable is Jackie's cousin Julio (Vazquez).

Ralph's wife, Victoria (Annabella Sciorra), an educated middle-class woman, has given up her good job as well as her self-respect to live with this philandering, self-important little man. Rock's lack of onstage charisma makes his appeal for her unintelligible to us, despite her assurances about his "package."

Hat is slickly directed by Anna D. Shapiro (who won the Tony for August: Osage County), with a set by Todd Rosenthal that, despite its grimy hallway and messy rooms, lacks character.

Guirgis's plays are usually about big ideas; in Hat, he deals merely with cruelly bad behavior: Infidelity is neither an idea nor big. We watch these characters in pitiable cycles of self-sabotage, and although we see the cost to them, we don't understand enough about their personalities. Jackie's empty arms at the end of the play are heartbreaking— so much passion, so much damage— but entirely predictable.