Carnegie Hall was the high point of our long weekend in New York City, but there were other amazing high points. One of them was the incredible play which Kathy and I saw Friday night titled . . . get this . . . The M**********r with the Hat. I’m using more asterisks than they do on the marquee, but I hope you are getting the gist of the title and of how shocking it was for Kathy and me to find ourselves in the audience for a play with a word in its title that I have never uttered in my life- and have probably never even so much as thought.
And believe it or not, it was my idea.
It all stemmed from an episode of the The Oprah WInfrey Show maybe a month and a half ago, when she interviewed one of my favorite comedians, Chris Rock (that’s probably just the first of many shocking surprises that await you in this blog entry) who has been a more frequent Oprah guest than any other man in the show’s history. In the course of the program, they talked about the play which he was doing on Broadway- and actually did a little feature about it which piqued my curiosity, even though they said next to nothing about the plot. One reason I was interested to see it someday is because the main star of the play is Bobby Cannavale, whose work I loved on Third Watch and Will and Grace, so I filed this away under “intriguing possibilities,” even though I knew that it wasn’t too likely that Kathy would be similarly interested in seeing something like this.
Fast forward to Friday the 27th, when Kathy was given the task of finding us tickets to see something that night while I went to rehearse with the choir. We weren’t really in close agreement on what to see and because it was a holiday weekend, some things like The Book of Mormon and War Horse appeared to be all but sold out. We didn’t have good internet access at the hotel, so Kathy ended up venturing out on foot to the theaters in the immediate vicinity, determined to grab something before everything was snapped up- and much to my amazement, when we met up a couple of hours later, she had two tickets for “The M*********** with a Hat.” For a moment, I was tempted to ask “who are you and what have you done with my wife?!?” But it turns out that she remembered that I had been interested in seeing this, and it was right around the corner from our hotel – and she was willing to give it a try, even though it was likely to be poles apart from the upbeat musical that she would have much preferred to see.
Our seats turned out to be in the third row, which was amazing because we really felt like we could almost feel the sweat of the actors. The set was incredible, too- with realistic-looking rooms that spun away so different rooms could take their place. What was almost awe-inspiring about the set was that every floor and wall seemed to be on its own little turntable, so that for instance a given wall would rotate downward and suddenly become the floor for the next scene, while a floor might rotate upwards and become a wall. And in the background and extending high up into the flies of the stage were segments of rough hewn fire escapes that made you feel like you were right in the middle of an inner city.
It’s hard to describe the plot, but it mostly concerns a man (played by Bobby Cannavale) who has recently gotten out of jail and is really anxious to rebuild his life and make amends for past mistakes. He has just gotten a job and is desperately trying to stay sober with the help of his sponsor (played by Chris Rock) and also trying to keep his volatile temper in check as he interacts with his strong-willed, drug-using girlfriend. The play began with her in a very spare, rough-looking room, talking to her mom on her cell phone and getting more aggravated by the second. In the space of those three minutes, the F word had to have been used forty times – (and I don’t mean Farmer) – and within seconds of the play beginning, Kathy and I glanced at other with a look that said “this isn’t exactly The Music Man, is it?”
No, it wasn’t – but it was a magnificent play, magnificently performed, and both of us walked out there feeling like we had experienced an incredible night of theater, having encountered characters who were vibrant human beings in all of their fascinating and maddening complexity. Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis does an incredible job of taking us “across the tracks,” as it were, and in the company of people who would seem to be utterly different from us, but who in fact long for so many of the very same things that we do. And maybe most valuable of all is how we come away from these characters feeling at least a bit of sympathy for them rather than the dismissive contempt which is so easy to feel when it’s just a photo in the newspaper or on the evening news of someone we don’t know who has screwed up their lives. This play does not backpedal from the reality that these characters have indeed screwed up, one way or another, but we care about them, feel genuinely bad for them, and root for them to escape from their darkness and into a brighter new day.
Anyway, it was certainly not what Kathy had bargained for, but she seemed to appreciate it every bit as much as I did – if for no other reason than because we were in the presence of such amazing excellence. And when we waited by the stage door afterwards and saw the cast members affably greeting members of the audience, all of the darkness of the play miraculously gone, it made you realize anew how vividly these actors had managed to shed their own personae to become these tragically flawed figures. I don’t know the mysterious gifts which allow someone to do that, but there is nothing more astonishing to me. And when I get to experience that kind of miracle, I don’t mind sitting through a few asterisks!
pictured above: the curtain call for “The M*****f***** with the Hat.” Second from the left is Bobby Cannavale, and on the far right is Chris Rock.