Theater of the Absurd: What Used to Shock is Now Dullness, What was Once Common is Now Taboo

GELFAND’S WORLD-The play Ubu Roi was once considered to be scandalous. Written by Alfred Jarry for the Paris of 1897, it was brought back by a talented group of student actors and actresses at Cal State Long Beach. It is best known for its title character, Ubu the king, also known as Pere Ubu (Pa Ubu in English), identified by critics (and even random web pages) as the first anti-protagonist. In short, Ubu is a pig -- a greedy and murderous glutton who is also a bit of a coward. Jarry took elements from various Shakespearian stories such as Macbeth, and adapted the plot elements, but not inner nobility, to the lead character. 

Ubu is anything but a tragic hero. The Macbeth element involves Ubu, an unambitious officer serving the king of Poland, whose wife goads him into plotting and carrying out the king's assassination in order to take the crown for himself. 

The difference between Ubu and Macbeth is that Macbeth is tormented by his own guilt, while Ubu is frankly happy-go-lucky about his newfound power. In fact, the play depicts his celebration over his new position as a bloodbath in which he kills the nobles for their money and extorts taxes out of the peasants. 

But the point of theater of the absurd is not the bare bones of plot elements, but an attempt to reveal something about the human condition directly to the audience, and often enough, to do so in a jarring manner. 

In Jarry's original text, the play begins with Ubu looking out at the audience and uttering a profanity. Jarry took the French word Merde, and added an extra syllable at the end to make it the word Merdre. This translates best as something like sh!tter, where I have replaced the correct letter with an exclamation point in keeping with public sensibilities. 

At CSULB, they took it a step further. At the start of the play, the cast, clad in full length unitards so that they looked like they were in kid's pajamas, joined in a broad circle and sang expletives to the tune of the chorus from Carmina Burana. I won't reproduce the whole text here, but just refer to the S word, the F word, and the C word, and type out the opening chorus as SSSS, FFFF, CCCCC, C'er. You can sing it to yourself if you'd like to get the musical effect. 

If this were the 1940s or '50s, it's likely that such a performance would have been closed down by the authorities, or never attempted in the first place. It's why they invented the expression "banned in Boston." What happened at Long Beach the other night was something quite different and interesting for what it was not. 

In an auditorium that is essentially theater in the square (ie: the audience sits on risers along the 4 walls and the players perform in the center), the room was full of students, faculty, and a few outsiders, and it was immediately evident that the audience was not only unshocked, it even seemed a little bored by the words. 

In other words, profanity for profanity's sake doesn't carry the weight it used to. Lenny Bruce used to say that it's just words, and perhaps he has finally won out. 

Another way of putting it is that the sexual revolution seems to be over, and sex won. 

Let's talk about the method for a minute, and then consider the why. Director Jeremy Aluma is a veteran of the group known as Four Clowns. He put together a collection of student performers under relatively short rehearsal time, and seems to have come out none the worse for wear. The students seemed to be most energetic while they were dancing, singing, and doing topical jokes. They played off of Star Wars parodies, made fun of the movie Titanic, and got laughs over the use of popular music. 

If you are wondering how this relates to a theatrical text written in the 1800s, you are entitled to do so, but the answer comes (at least partially) in the ideas that underlie theatre of the absurd. And to go to that, we have to invest at least a sentence or two to the ideas of surrealism and the mad man known as Antonin Artaud. 

To the modern audience, Artaud is viewable in the film The Passion of Joan of Arc and in Napoleon Par Vu Abel Gance. These are certainly two of the most important and influential films ever made. (Napoleon got close to ten thousand viewers in its 4 performances when it was shown in Oakland a couple of years ago.) To the literati, Artaud is best known for creating the Theatre Alfred Jarry (notice the connection?) and developing his own body of theory about how theater can be done. 

Artaud was impressed with ritualistic performances that didn't rely so much on dialog as on bringing out the human unconscious through movement, noise, lights, and strange sounds. Plot linearity was out, and experience was in. Out of Artaudian thought, much of the theater of the absurd and avant garde theater developed. In discussion after the play, the director replied that he was influenced by Artaud in his early studies, and some of that came through in this performance. 

What's important about all of this is that the actual text of the play becomes less important. Rather than being set in stone, the play is left to the director, and even the players, to develop out of their inner selves, their imaginations, and issues of the day. 

In other words, if you are going to do an absurdist tragicomedy that is long since out of copyright, you have a hunting license to pick and choose the parts you like out of the old text, even as you pad the production with your own jokes and physical movements. 

And that they did. 

Director Aluma also pulled off an interesting theatrical artistic decision, that fell somewhere between a prank and an excellent teaching tool. Unbeknownst to the audience, he allowed fully nine of his troupe to play the lead character. 

It's curiously more easy than that sounds. Ubu the king has traditionally been played as an obese fellow with a giant green phallus. The director had merely to costume Ubu in a fatty jacket with attached green phallus ("By my green candle," says Ubu several times) and provide a mask. The players would go off the playing surface, exchange garb, and a new Ubu would enter. Most of the time, we wouldn't have known except that we would start with a male Ubu, then a few minutes later have a female Ubu, and so forth. 

This makes it hard to write a careful critique about the character playing Ubu. It could have been Rob Bergman we are talking about, or Tyler Bremer, or Laurel Buck, or Montana Bull. Or it could have been Ammy Ontiveros or Quin Sheridan. Then again, it could have been Jerry Campisi or Jamarr Love. Well, it's possible to recognize Jamarr Love because he was the African American player who not only played Ubu, he got one of the better lines in one of his other roles. The original Jarry text has the king of Poland grandiosely promising to go outside to a public festivity without his sword, much to the dismay of his wife and son. Jamarr Love, this time as the king, does the original line, then looks at the audience and says, "An unarmed Black man in America. What could go wrong?" 

Siri Joy Tveter, one of the female Ubus, was particularly good at movement and dance. Montana Bull turned her turn as Ubu into something of a standup comedy act, going back and forth verbally with the audience. 

And while the music and dancing and sword fighting took place, it seemed, to your critic (of a certain age) that just about every fifth word started with F, unless it was the word that starts with S. 

And nobody cared. Nobody was bothered. Maybe one person. Because it's true that one woman walked out about halfway through, but nobody else seemed to be upset or even shocked. They laughed at fairly thin humor, chuckled when Love entered wearing a Darth Vader helmet, and at least several audience members were invited to join the show for a moment, much as a contestant to The Price is Right would Come on Down. 

In spite of the words to wash one's mouth out with soap by, this was a fairly civil Ubu. The director rewrote the ending so as to provide for Ubu's death. In the original, Ubu is still going strong, having left a trail of bodies and broken promises behind. You might say that we got an un-Hollywood ending. The other thing about this performance is more a matter of tone than anything else. Generations of writers and critics have pointed out that as written, the character Ubu is a slime. The overall feel to the original play is one of justice remaining untriumphant, evil winning out, and karma leaving itself out of the equation. We didn't really get that feeling from this production. Sure there were formalistic violations of modern mores -- murder for instance -- but they weren't played for audience horror or catharsis. 

In other words, this Ubu didn't really transgress a lot of taboos, unlike the original showings. Perhaps Ubu could have better been played with a George W. Bush mask, or -- in keeping with the transgressive attempt in the original script -- violated the taboo over racism. This approach would have been a lot different than doing jokes about paying off student loans in front of an audience of students, but the students would have gotten some of the feelings of disgust and indignation that is supposed to come out of a performance of Ubu Roi. The use of raw, unfiltered profanity was obviously intended to be that transgressive element, but the unintended lesson of this production seems to be that for the smart-phone generation, profanity by itself is simply an expression of emotional engagement, and doesn't carry either the intent or the effect of shock that it once did. 

In conversation with the director, it came out that he had done a more traditional version a few years ago, and altered the approach for this one. I think that this is a work in progress, as it has been for 117 years, and it will be interesting to see what Four Clowns comes up with the next time around.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw