Chris Rock on Broadway

Saw The Motherfucker With The Hat with a pretty full house on Sunday. When Chris Rock first appeared on stage the crowd broke into huge applause. His character is not as coarse as the play’s title.

Several of the critics loved the play. The New York Times’ critic saw the play about additions and inability to love as a comedy. While people did occasionally laugh, such disfunction was not comic but tragic to me.

Smaller critics thought the performances of the two lead working class drug addicts who love but can’t stay in love with each other, carried the play. I agree that they performed fantastically but am tired of “middle-class” playwrights trying to write about the working poor.

Like Neal LaBrute’s Reasons to Be Pretty, the first scene is a fight between the two working poor characters. Most of the time, the two characters are yelling. It made me not see them as fully-realized people that I could feel for.

Mother makes some interesting points about addictions and how difficult they are to escape. The play suggests that love is an addition, runs through the issues of 12-step programs, and suggests that sometimes people replace problem addictions with ones that can be as harmful or more harmful to others. It suggests that many of us are addicted.

Hell, that really often doesn’t matter to them because they are in their own world. Rock’s character is in his own world and harmful to others through his magnetism. Intriguingly, I didn’t feel it. He seems more like the henpecked husband he’s played in a few of his movies more than a magnetic lethario.