TT: Into the (spot)light

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of Wit and the Florida premiere of The Motherf**ker with the Hat. Here’s an excerpt.
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Margaret Edson’s “Wit” is one of a surprisingly large number of plays that managed to win a Pulitzer Prize without first making it to Broadway. Fourteen years after it opened Off Broadway, “Wit” is finally being presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club in its Broadway house. Why the delay? No doubt the release of Mike Nichols’ 2001 cable-TV version, which starred Emma Thompson, had something to do with it. The biggest roadblock, however, is that “Wit” is the story of the death of a woman suffering from late-stage ovarian cancer. The only way to get so dark a play to Broadway nowadays is to hire a big name, and it seems more than likely that this revival, directed by Lynne Meadow, would never have opened there had Cynthia Nixon not agreed to be the star.
Unfortunately, Ms. Nixon’s acting is part of what’s wrong with the production, for she plays Vivian Bearing, the austere, loveless scholar of 17th-century poetry around whose terrible plight “Wit” revolves, as though she were a precocious schoolgirl rather than a full-grown, forbiddingly chilly intellectual. Only when suffering strips away Vivian’s defenses does Ms. Nixon come into her own, and by then it’s too late for her to overcome the lightweight impression that she’s already made.
What else is wrong with this “Wit”? In 1998 it was still comparatively unusual to see a fatal illness portrayed in anything like a candid way onstage or on the screen. Nowadays, though, such portrayals are common enough that the play’s initial shock effect has been significantly diminished…
The best new play of 2011 had the worst title, which helps to explain why Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” (as it was officially billed) barely eked out a 112-performance run on Broadway. Now it belongs to the regional theaters, and GableStage, one of Florida’s top companies, has mounted a first-class production that confirms my initial impression of its excellence.
Mr. Guirgis’ play is an anti-romantic romcom about the effects of the therapeutic culture on a group of substance abusers. It’s smart, concise (95 minutes, no intermission) and full of pointed punch lines (“If you ever need money for rehab or an exorcism, let me know”). All five characters are drawn with sympathetic sharpness, meaning that the play must be cast very, very well in order to hit the bull’s-eye. Chris Rock, the star of the Broadway production, is new to the stage, and his performance, not surprisingly, was promising but far from great. By contrast, GableStage’s Ethan Henry, who has plenty of regional-theater experience, is self-assured and commanding in the same role, that of a slick, sociopathic scamster. Gladys Ramirez shines no less brightly as Veronica, the foul-mouthed working-class babe whose brass-plated charms set Mr. Guirgis’ farce-style plot in motion….
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Read the whole thing here.