Commentary | How do you write about a play with an unprintable title?

“How the ____ am I going to write about it?”

Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that line, exactly as you see it there, with the underscore instead of the naughty word, in a review of a Stephen Guirgis play.

It’s something that everyone who writes about theater for mainstream publications had to start wondering about when the play first came to national attention in 2011. Even writers who weren’t in New York had to assume they would have to write about it eventually.

Guirgis is a prominent playwright — he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his next play, “Between Riverside and Crazy,” in 2015 — and the play in question got strong reviews for its Broadway run. That production starred Chris Rock (in his Broadway debut), Bobby Cannavale and Annabella Sciorra. So it was obvious it was a major play that would be working its way around the country before too long.

It’s now in Sarasota, in a new production at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.

So how do you write about what Brantley called “the play that dare not speak its name”?

Most publications have rules for how they deal with titles and quotations that contain obscene words. At the Bradenton Herald, we refer to this play as “The (Expletive) with the Hat.”

Your first guess as to what the expletive is will probably be the right one. But just in case you can’t figure it out, here’s a major clue: the entry in Wikipedia lists “The Mother With the Hat” as an alternate title.

The dark comedy revolves around a man recently released from prison and recently clean and sober who returns home to his girlfriend. He finds a man’s hat in her bedroom, a hat that’s not his, and realizes she has cheated on him. He arms himself and sets out to discover the identity of the, um, gentleman who owns the hat.

The New York Times replaces the offensive word with that underscore, as Brantley’s question above would suggest. But in a headline, it used the first letter of the word, followed by 11 asterisks.

Asterisks and dashes come into play when other publications wrote about the play. Some replace two letters in the middle of the word, others three. People at the Asolo Conservatory talked about it and decided to substitute asterisks for the eighth, ninth and 10th letters. The Los Angeles Times replaces the last six letters of the word with ellipses.

A Facebook page devoted to the play replaces the third syllable of the word with the letters EFF. The Wall Street Journal has used two asterisks, or referred to the play simply as “Hat.”

Guirgis has said he didn’t expect the play to get to Broadway, and that he thought the title would be fine for an Off-Broadway production, where people expect a little edginess. He has called the title “a blessing and a curse.” It’s a curse, he said, because sometimes people don’t talk about anything but the title, and it’s a blessing because people know before they buy their tickets that the show is going to be linguistically coarse. (Celine Rosenthal, who’s directing the Asolo Conservatory production, describes Guirgis’ language in the play as “the poetry of profanity.”)

A surprising number of publications, especially online, spell out the word with no dots or dashes or stars or omissions. So if that word bothers you, you’d be well advised not to Google the play, or even Guirgis.

There’s been speculation that the play’s lack of commercial success, on Broadway, despite great reviews, had to do with that title. Maybe some people didn’t want to call and ask about tickets or tell their friends they were going to see a play with that word front and center in the title. It’s a bit tricky to write about the play without spelling out the title. But with a little creative use of hyphens and blanks, it’s doable. Speaking about it without saying the title is a lot tougher.

It’s a little odd to call someone and say, “Hey, do you want to see ‘The Expletive With the Hat’?”

This story was originally published December 29, 2017 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Commentary | How do you write about a play with an unprintable title?."