O Brother, Where Art Thou? Apothecary's Hat Trick

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It seems like ever since the Coen Brothers started crafting plays for Off-Broadway, Off-Broadway, in response, has started crafting Coen Bros. movies for the stage.  Richard Taylor's dark comedy for the Apothecary Theatre Company is no exception, which is not to say it's not an engaging, tightly-directed piece of theatre in its own right.  It's just that, in the inimitable Coen Bros. style, graves are dug and bodies fall from the sky in the new play, In God's Hat.

The two brothers here are Mitch and his younger sibling Roy.  They spend most of the play cramped into a sleazy motel room crafted by set designer Michael Reese in a style that's letter-perfect, right down to its mustard paneling and water-stained ceiling.  The brothers decamp after Roy, played with understated grace by Emmy-winning soap vet Tom Pelphrey, picks up the fragile, bespectacled Mitch, played well by Rhett Rossi, who's just done a ten year stint in the penitentiary for, we learn later, pedophila.

And while the motel set seems claustrophobic at first, it later opens up, using an interior bathroom with all the skill of a good French farce.  When a man who nearly killed Mitch in prison arrives with a knock on the door, Mitch holes up in the gritty, avocado-tiled bathroom while Roy tries to dispatch Dennis Flanagan's prison-yard skinhead Arthur, who strong arms his way into the room with a progressive list of demands: first a twenty spot, then a beer, and finally, natch, a trip to the bathroom.

The tension in this showdown is heightened because Mitch has already bared the jagged scar Arthur inflicted on him in prison.  It runs the length of his torso like a beauty queen's sash and is one of the few missteps of this production.  The scar is, quite simply, one of the worst makeup jobs on the boards today, but it manages to communicate that the slightest misstep could mean certain death for Mitch, if not Roy as well.  Apprehension mounts and the first act ends in a bloody, Grand Guignol style set piece that makes one wonder what's left for act two.

The answer is plenty.  The room is besieged yet again and it would be a spoiler to say much more than the noirish excess to which this cast is pushed, is on par with the best of Sam Sheppard, Martin McDonagh or Tracy Letts, all of whom, one gets the feeling, might be checked into the adjacent rooms of this fleabag, probably employing the same amount of Karo syrup.

But the quality of the writing is also up to that same standard.  What playwright Richard Taylor can't show us in that cramped motel room, like the big sky of Oklahoma, the ancestral home where the brothers are returning, he is able to suggest through superbly crafted language.  And that's no easy feat given the terse economy with which Taylor's characters express themselves.

Mitch's lips are as tight as his cowboy Levis and Roy's ironically childlike nature puts much communication above and beyond him.  This can get a little clunky when the siblings get around to discussing the sexual abuse at the hands of their father, also the only point at which the play veers into the very charted territory of an Oprah segment.

But most times the boys are quite apt at expressing what they need to, precisely by not saying it.  "I don't want to talk about this," is a favorite line of Roy's, who'd rather pummel a football at his brother's chest than unpack some of their early childhood baggage.

Director Kevin Kittle keep God's Hat, as well as several other plates, in the air simultaneously.  He's able to sustain a potent mixture of tension, comedy and twists over the course of two acts in two hours, and lends the proceedings an air of credibility they may not have on paper.  A lot of stuff happens in this play: reversals, re-reversals and, as stated above, lots of stage blood, but Kittle stages it all in a way that moves it along briskly, yet believably.

Probably the most impressive thing about this production is that it's Apothecary Theatre Company's debut.  The company is cobbled together mainly from folks who met at the Rutgers University acting department, where Kittle is a professor.  If this inaugural production is any indicator, it may be time to quit that day job, or at least give Kittle a few chili peppers on ratemyprofessors.com.

Editor's Note: In God’s Hat plays the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, through August 7th.