Plaza College: Campus

FALL 2011

The Writer's Well

    Venice Anderson
  • Venice Anderson attended the highly controversial play The Mother with the Hat during the Spring 2011 semester with her Modern Drama class.

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The Mother with the Hat

By Venice Anderson

Talk about raw. The Mother with the Hat spared no emotions or curse words. This play is definitely not for the faint of heart.

The characters are all addicted in one way or another, and bring the distasteful side of drug addiction and adultery to the stage. Bobby Cannavale, who plays Jackie, gives an incredible performance that is heartrending, but also hilarious at times. He is an ex-con and would-be recovering drunk who is in love with Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), a drug addict. Jackie comes home and finds a hat on the table and immediately assumes that Veronica is cheating on him. Jackie has an AA sponsor, Ralph (Chris Rock) who is also a recovering addict, in whom Jackie confides. After Jackie complains to Ralph about what happened, Ralph encourages Jackie not to do anything stupid.

As the play unfolds, Jackie finds out that his friend Ralph is the “mother” with the hat who slept with Veronica. Although I am a ‘later-bloomer’ to Broadway plays, I expected more of an explosion in the climax between Jackie and Ralph. The fireworks faded too quickly, causing the scene to become mundane and faded before the lights went out.

Nevertheless, Jackie’s cousin Julio (Yul Vazquez) lightened the tone of the play by adding comic relief to the extremely raw setting. Out of love for his cousin, Julio expresses that his being loyal is because of Jackie’s dead mother. His punch lines are sharp and always seem to hit a nerve for Jackie. Elizabeth Rodriguez was dynamic in her performance. She pulled the audience in, and her every emotion, from happiness to heartbreak, could be felt. I felt like a puppet and she was the puppet master, pulling my strings to where she wanted me to be in every moment. Chris Rock was funny (as usual) and great, but not as dynamic as the other characters.

It was good for the audience to set aside the problems of the real world and bask in the make-believe version on stage. All of us at some point have been hurt by love or have hurt someone we love. We all at some point have been addicted to someone or something and vice versa. The storyline makes us realize that each of us is faced with problems, but it’s the decisions we make that set the stage for a positive or negative outcome.