Washington Post - Highly Recommended
"...In the affecting and seductively funny Studio Theatre production of the play, seamlessly directed by Serge Seiden, you can glimpse the romance at key moments in the expressions and gestures of actor Drew Cortese. Cortese plays the comedy's central character, Jackie, an ex-con who tends to fly off the handle at the least provocation. Jackie has a manic, trash-talking, fist-pumping manner, and he's fond of borrowing, and using, a local gangster's gun. But he loves his longtime girlfriend, Veronica. At one point, when he realizes that he has caused her unwonted distress, he rocks numbly as he sits on a chair, biting his lip, looking stricken and fierce, tearful and defiant, simultaneously."
DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...Life is messy, and sometimes painful, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. For many, love hurts. As our experiences grow and we mature, hopefully it is learned that true love isn't supposed to hurt. Love is happiness and acceptance. If the love you receive doesn't feel good and doesn't make you happy then one has to question: Is it real love, the love you wish it to be, or, is it the "love" you think you deserve?"
Washington Examiner - Highly Recommended
"...Indeed, "The Motherf***** with the Hat" is more than just a delightful romp through barbed wire, it's an awe-inspiring treasure trove of jewels mined from a man who has obviously spent some time loitering at rock bottom. Here, Guirgis shines light into dark places in the human psyche, profiling a group of addicts tiptoeing along that tenuous tightrope between sanity and sobriety."
MetroWeekly - Highly Recommended
"...Studio Theatre's sharp production, directed by Serge Seiden with great assist on sets by Debra Booth, is riotously funny. It's also infinitely smarter and more sophisticated than you might take it for at first blush - and so are its mostly Nuyorican characters. And as it turns out, the mofo of the show's title isn't at all who we're first led to believe it is, and the show's main theme is about that duplicity: the yin and yang of every single sentient being. How we're all individually, inescapably, both good and bad, sensitive and self-absorbed, genuine and fake - just putting on appearances. ''Funny how people can be more than one thing, ain't it?'' says the show's protagonist Jackie."
Talkin Broadway - Highly Recommended
"...The entire cast works beautifully, both as individuals and as an ensemble. Cortese is funny and touching as a man in over his head; Mara shows how a person can use sincerity as a weapon; the women have the opportunity to rant and holler; and Ariza seems like a genuinely nice character is a tough situation. The verbal and physical interplay among the characters is what propels the action, which incorporates some vividly staged business by fight director Robb Hunter."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...I'll stop pouring quarters into the swear jar now, but there's no denying the hat-wearer playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has dreamed up deserves the Oedipal epithet and then some. He's manipulative, he's conniving, he's selfish, he's vegan. He's also, God help us, the clearest-thinking, least-deluded person on this stage, and this infuriating motherf-I mean character, is the single biggest reason Guirgis' journey-into-hell narrative succeeds in sketching out the human condition so, uh, unconditionally."
Washingtonian - Recommended
"...Still, the story of Jackie and his breaking-not-so-bad road to redemption offers plenty of twisted humor, as well as a curiously optimistic parable on the hazards of clean living. Jackie's path may well feature another sojourn upstate, but it's hard not to feel through Cortese's nuanced performance that the character's potential won't end there."
The Georgetowner - Highly Recommended
"...Some things you should know about "The Motherf**cker With the Hat," a scabrous, oddly lyrical, mightily profane play by the gifted newish playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, which is now receiving a riveting, compulsively engaging production at Studio Theatre under the direction of Serge Seiden."
MD Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...The Motherf***er with the Hat is a searingly honest look at our American character, our loves and addictions; and those loves and addictions cut across socio-economic lines, affecting the ex-con as much as the ex-stock broker. The play's humor is abundant, but its humor masks the pain brooding beneath the surface. When that humor simply cannot cancel the pain anymore, and the pain erupts, the truth of our endeavors becomes clear. Then, we cannot help but see ourselves in those characters inhabiting the stage. We might not be that mother or that hat; but we most definitely know, or have known, both the mother and the hat on more than one occasion. And it is that authenticity of expression, and the insights that follow, that make this production a truly memorable theatrical experience."
DCTheatreScene - Highly Recommended
Motherf**ker is a swim in an acid bath of recrimination, where users, losers, addicts and their facilitators slowly drown under the weight of their own delusions. It is also – and I know this is hard to believe about a play which has addiction as part of its motif – scabrously funny. From the moment that Veronica (Rosal Colón), after doing a line of coke, gives her drunk mother romantic advice (on dealing with mom’s fish-faced, abusive lover, “take a real good look and ask yourself in all honesty
