Five minutes into the cast read-through of The Motherf**ker with the Hat, the New York script and Vancouver venue blur into one.
It’s an overcast morning in early December. Five actors and a handful of stage crew – including the director and several designers – are seated around a grouping of tables in an airy rehearsal room on an upper floor of the Firehall Arts Centre.
Actor Stephen Lobo is speaking. He’s got a highlighted script open in front of him, but he’s not referring to it. A torrent of words – about love, drugs, and betrayal – flood out of Lobo and towards Kyra Zagorsky, who is seated beside him.
His words bounce between raw fury, howling-at-the-moon pain, and crazy love. Lobo’s character is fucked up; he’s got addiction and mental health issues. Zagorsky’s character, too. And she’s giving as ferociously as she gets.
As the wild emotions shoot around the table like bullets, another voice enters the fray: a second male voice, angry and loud. But it’s not coming from the rehearsal room.
It belongs to a man on the street below. He’s unleashing a stream of undecipherable but clearly disturbed words as he pushes his cart up East Cordova.
But it fits. The Vancouver man yelling on the street and the New York characters in the rehearsal room: They’re from the same place. This world of addiction and mental illness is their home.
Steven Adley Guirgis’ 2011 drama The Motherf**ker with the Hat marks the first production of the Haberdashery Theatre Company.
The company was founded by a group of like-minded actors from the film & TV scene: besides Lobo (Continuum, Arctic Air) and Zagorsky (Helix), there’s John Cassini (Intelligence, Blackstone), Lori Triolo (Smallville, The 4400), Brian Markinson (Mad Men), and Jenn MacLean-Angus (Gracepoint).
Francisco Trujillo (Beauty and The Beast) rounds out the cast for this inaugural production.
The Motherf**ker with the Hat follows Jackie (Lobo), an ex-con and addict struggling to get his life back on track with the help of his sponsor (Cassini). Jackie’s efforts are challenged by his girlfriend (Zagorsky), an alcoholic/addict who he suspects is cheating on him with the titular Motherf**cker.
“These characters are filled with so much heart, and pain, and they’re trying to overcome and fight,” says Lobo during a roundtable cast chat following the read-through. “I think [Guirgis] is one of the most exciting poet-playwrights around.”
It was Lobo who pursued and secured the rights to the play. He was at the tail end of a busy few years in the film and TV sphere, and wanted to get back to his theatre roots.
Lobo had intended to mount Motherf**cker in “a shoe closet,” but as he reached out to actors in his community, interest grew, and that interest snowballed into action.
The result: a newly formed theatre company, and a two-week run at a major Vancouver venue.
“When I became an actor, it was all about doing theatre. I didn’t think about doing film and TV,” says Cassini. “If you’re capable of making a living of film and television, it’s a fortunate thing, and it’s a great medium. But we always long to go back to the theatre.”
The last time Cassini was on stage, it was as part of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company’s final play, God of Carnage.
“Going back to it feels like home,” he says.
The blurring of story and venue is one of the reasons that Markinson was eager to not only direct this play, but to present it at the historic Firehall Arts Centre.
“It’s a play about people who are struggling with addiction and struggling through their recovery, and we’re at one of the ground zeros in all of North America for that,” says Markinson.
“I love the idea that there’s a blurring of the line between what happens out there, and what happens in the space. At the end of the 90 minutes, [the audience is] going to take it and they’re going to walk back into that world… Maybe they’ll see the invisible people.”
The characters are lifted beyond the easy stereotypes, says Trujillo, who portrays Jackie’s clean-living cousin. “I love how you think you’re getting a stereotype, but they’re just so deep. We’re hearing the heart.”
Zagorsky was last seen playing an equally nuanced woman in the Arts Club’s critically acclaimed production of Disgraced.
She revels in the fullness of her Motherf**ker character. “I love how full of life Veronica is, and how ferocious she is as a survivor, and how full of love she is, and the balance and contradiction of that,” says Zagorsky.
The events of the play unfold in New York City, a city for whom the bulk of the actors have some connection – not the least of which is Triolo.
In the early 1990s, Triolo started a company with a trio of theatre artists that included Motherf**cker writer Guirgis (who last year won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for Between Riverside and Crazy).
“Our company was called the Salt of the Earth,” recalls Triolo. “We built a 60-seat black box theatre above a grocery store on Arthur Avenue, in the Little Italy section of the Bronx.”
The company’s goal was to challenge stereotypes. “As Italian Americans in 1991, we were [playing] one thing: we were in the mafia,” says Triolo. “We went to all of the merchants in the area and said, ‘We want to show us in a light that isn’t just that.’”
Haberdashery Theatre Company's production of The Motherf**cker with the Hat runs Jan. 16-30 at the Firehall Arts Centre. Tickets at FirehallArtsCentre.ca.
