Teddy Wolff - Drew Cortese (left) and Liche Ariza (right), The Motherf---er with the Hat, Photo by Teddy Wolff.
We don’t always say it when we say it.
We say “the f-word.” We say effing, freaking, flipping. We use dashes and asterisks and parades of punctuation whose length is directly proportional to our emphasis. We spell it in front of the kids. We say it in hate, in outrage, in pain, in awe, in exhaustion, in lust, in disgust.
(Ursa Waz) - Portrait shot of actor, writer and director Mike Daisey. Diasey wrote the monologue F---ing F---ing F---ing Ayn Rand for Public Theater in NY.
Many of us find it disrespectful, vulgar, repulsive. We have been fined and fired for saying it on television. We won’t print it in the newspaper.
And yet the word will grace at least two marquees of Washington theaters this year. “The Motherf---er With the Hat” by Stephen Adly Guirgis is enjoying a six-week engagement at Studio Theatre. “Stupid F---ing Bird,” an adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” by D.C. playwright and director Aaron Posner, will have its world premiere at Woolly Mammoth in May. At the Public Theater in New York, frequent Woolly guest Mike Daisey finished a run of his monologue “F---ing F---ing F---ing Ayn Rand” in January.
So, why is that word in so many titles?
“I’ve now been forbidden to say the name of my own play in front of my own daughter,” said Posner, whose child is 15 months old. “Because she says the word now very clearly.”
Posner’s title started as a joke, a sly shout-out to his source material. But immediately after he said it aloud, “I thought: I should do that . . . I felt that title accurately depicted the energy of the play.”
“Bird” is “not your grandfather’s Chekhov,” said Posner. It’s a modern, irreverent take on a classic, and the title sends that message.
Deeksha Gaur, director of marketing and public relations at Woolly Mammoth, said the decision of where and how to censor Posner’s play title in promotional material is “an ongoing discussion for us.” The word appears, sans hyphens, on the posters outside the theater, which are across from the main entrance but somewhat hidden from the street.
“We just felt it didn’t really go with the Woolly brand to hide the word,” said Gaur.
“Our mission is to do work that pushes boundaries in terms of content and aesthetics.”
Despite that credo, Woolly still has to contend with aggressive e-mail blockers that see viruses in every vulgarity. “Putting the full word into the e-mail may be sending the e-mails into people’s spam filters,” said Gaur. “[And] when we get to the point where we’re putting posters out in the streets, we’re going to have to consider that because it’s reaching a far wider audience.”
One idea Woolly is exploring is to put a “parental advisory” sticker over the title “to indicate that we’re not scared of the word, but we’re doing this because other people might have a response to the word.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me, why you would put that up on a marquee,” said Cindy Senning, Emily Post’s great-granddaughter and director of the Emily Post Institute. “I think you’re likely to turn away a lot of people. You don’t need profanity to attract people.”
Both Posner and Guirgis believe their titles give audiences a clear heads-up about what to expect from the plays. The main characters in “Hat” are a drug dealer fresh out of prison and his still-using girlfriend, not exactly a “gosh darn it!”-declaring kind of crowd.
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