This highly entertaining, funny dramedy more than lives up to its actual title which is deemed too rude to print in full: this “mofo” show delivers fruity words with relish. And it points out that one woman’s verbal obscenities are another’s terms of endearment: “I’ll kick a three-legged kitten down a flight of f***in’ stairs rather than say some shit like ‘I love you’,” says one character.

The man with the hat might be cuckolding the lead character, Jackie, who’s just out of prison. But Jackie’s Puerto Rican girlfriend Veronica denies it: “You got an imagination like Dr f***ing Seuss or something! [More]

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The title is a disclaimer, according to the program. 

As we are seated in traverse, the faces of my “fellow mother f’s” – as we’ve been dubbed by the front of house team – are hard to read. Hat ran on Broadway for three months and picked up six Tony Award nominations and several Drama Desks. My skepticism, as always, comes around the success of lifting a New York production, set in New York, and plonking it in Auckland and allowing the audience a free pass into a Time Square S.R.O. Perhaps the other Hat-goers felt the same. Our fears, however, are in vain.

The conviction of all of the cast, is astonishing, the Basement’s sparse concrete floor adding to the complete displacement of the audience to New York’s ‘ghetto’ where The Mother Fucker With The Hat’s action plays out. The simple set, designed by Laura Smith complements this well. 

Calum Gittins leads us through his red-blooded life as a former drug dealer, ex-con, recovering addict and self-professed a-hole, Jackie. Gittins pulls us along the narrative with his astounding explosive energy and pent up testosterone. His girlfriend, coke-fiend Veronica, is played by Saraid Cameron. She opens the play with a heated, full-blown, coke-fuelled phone conversation with her mother, before Jackie interrupts. Cameron invests the character with heart and warmth, despite Veronica’s inherent stubbornness and terrible judgment.

The play hinges around Jackie’s relationship with his A.A. sponsor, the maddeningly sober and platitude-spitting Ralph D, brought to us by Fasitua Amosa. Amosa is just as abrasive in his stoicism as Gittins is in his mania. The characters are well written foils, and well set against each other here.

Andi Crown and John Tui support these three strongly as Victoria and Cousin Julio respectively. Tui almost steals the show at times with his often camp and larger-than-life but never gauche characterisation, providing relief from the relentless conflict that seems to follow Jackie around.

The show, however, is not about shock value. Whilst there are no holds barred in the high-octane detailing of just a few days of Jackie’s manic life, writer Stephen Adly Guirgis does not go out of his way to be offensive, and with Edwin Wright’s direction, even the 258 drops of the ‘F bomb’ don’t come out as crude. Wright works well with the cast of five to guide them with style through the lengthy scenes that bring light to the rather bleak life of Jackie.

The traverse seating allows me a taste of what the full-house opening night audience is experiencing. The most obvious thing is this audience needs no title censorship. Plenty of jaws are dropped and gasps are inhaled but never at the ‘F bomb’. The production seems to exist in fragility and subtlety despite the bombastic title. The attention to detail in the head-to-head arguments that dominate the action makes for some exciting battles, with climaxes throughout that keep us active and interested.

Wright, in the programme notes, states, “We all f___ up, we all make a mess… sometimes it’s easy…sometimes we lose things forever.” The show seems to entertain the notion of trying to regain something you have lost: your sobriety, your passion, your respect. This give the cast a focus and direction, and we don’t get hung up on the absurdness of Jackie’s life.  

Hat runs at Basement until June 14. Not for the faint hearted, but if you can make it through the title, you’re halfway there.

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