In Stephen Adly Guirgis's hometown of New York, where profanity and prudishness can rub up against one another like subway travellers from the right and wrong side of the tracks, some publications did not use asterisks in the title of Guirgis's ferociously funny play of 2011. Instead, they replaced the entire epithet with a motherf**ker-length hyphen.
The logic of this is worth a moment. The idea was presumably to save sensitive readers from being lulled into a false sense of security by the blameless first half of the term only to find they had inadvertently soiled their otherwise pure-of-thought mind by thinking the second half. Although, they would have to know the word in the first place to think it. Go figure.
The shock value of Guigis's title is presumably therefore stronger over there than it is here where, 20 years ago, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fu**ing received its West End debut. ( After watching Ravenhill's explicit breakthrough play, I'll never forget following two New York ladies out of the theatre. "Well," said one to the other, "there wasn't much shopping.")
The title of Guirgis's play is one of the milder exchanges between combustible Puerto Rican lovers Jackie (Desperate Housewives star Ricardo Chavira) and childhood sweetheart Veronica (Flor De Liz Perez). Jackie has just been released from prison. But things are looking up. He has a job and is making "grown-up plans… you and me plans… next step plans." Then, in her Hell's Kitchen apartment, he spots the eponymous hat. It is not his. Nor is the smell in the bed-sheets.
Most of the play's gripping 90 minutes charts Jackie's obsessive attempt to establish who owns the hat. It also witnesses the unravelling of his hope. Yet it does so with such exhilarating language it thrills with the lyrical profanity with which these New Yorkers express themselves.
Guirgis is a writer whose characters exist on the margins and break laws. But they nobly attempt to live by rules. Nearly everyone here is an addict: Jackie is addicted to alcohol, as is his best friend Ralph (Alec Newman). Veronica is addicted to cocaine and Jackie's loyal gay cousin Julio, to sex. Most are likeable. But it says something of Guirgis's dark outlook that he allocates the wisest insights about their condition to the nastiest manipulator in the bunch.
Indhu Rubasingham's excellent production is given lashings of authenticity by being mostly cast with American actors for whom the percussive, punchy rhythms of Guirgis's language is second nature. As Julio, Yul Vázquez upstages everyone with a reprise of his performance in the original production – a mesmerising display of quiet, coiled, controlled camp.
Robert Jones's design will also stay a long time in the mind: New York is evoked with suspended wrought iron fire escapes that twirl against a jet back void. And the rooms in which Guirgis's characters forgive and fight appear out of and disappear into the darkness as if the people inside were trapped in a kind of purgatory. They probably are.