NEW YORK — Stephen Adly Guirgis had written only 20 or so pages of “The [Expletive] With the Hat” when he was tempted to abandon the play.

Not because writing is a species of torment for him, though it is, or because he prefers acting “about a billion times more,” though he does. The problem looming in his path, shortly before his New York-based theater company gave a reading of the script for the first time, was that he had already spent so much of his playwriting career sketching similar terrain.