STAGE REVIEW The Irresistable Rise of Ubu Roi The Other Side returns to the stage with the play that changed theater. BY STEFFEN SILVIS 243-2122 EXT. 343

Ubu Roi The Other Side at the Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 938-1482. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 pm Sundays. Closes Dec. 12 $5-$7.50 On Dec. 10, 1896, the actor Firmin Gémier stood in the center of the stage at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris wearing a pear-shaped mask of dog hide and a ripe gut made of cardboard. After a moment's silence, he uttered the first line of the play: "Merde!" A riot, which included André Gide, William Butler Yeats, Rémy de Gourmont and Arthur Symons, ensued for 20 minutes. That December night 102 years ago marked two premières: Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi and the modern, anti-realistic theater. Jarry's Ubu was a new and astonishing Everyman. Coarse, cowardly and gluttonous, he was the embodiment of mankind as a whole and patterned on Jarry's fat and incompetent middle-school physics teacher. A precocious misanthrope weaned on Rabelais and the Latin footnotes to Aristophanes, Jarry was only 15 when he brought Ubu to monstrous life. The Other Side Theatre's approach to the absurd adventures of Ubu is really quite brilliant. Ubu's dazzling excesses are the product of the imaginative and cruel country of childhood, and so director Charmian Creagle has taken this child-conjured epic and handed it to a band of actors playing children to execute it. The result is almost perfect. The play's famous excursiveness is linked to a child's ability to create multifaceted narratives crammed within ever-diminishing attention spans. Creagle has created a set of slate, on which the children chalk out locations and the odd prop not found in a large toy box up-stage. Creagle also honors the innate sense of value children place in found objects, a value we have to relearn as "rational" adults. The main strength of this production is in Creagle's cast, which includes Other Side company members and newcomers. Nick von Esmarch falters a bit as Ubu. He knows how to be both coward and bully, but he lacks the defining lines which mark a child's emotions. But both Sean Doran and Jennifer Hoyt are superb. Hoyt continues to amaze this writer with her skill, and Doran grows more confident as an actor in each subsequent play. Of the other permanent members, Ryan Schaufler cuts a wild Czar, and James Moore is hilarious as King Venceslas. The other striking performance in this production is Elana Isaacs' Queen, which is a great piece of physical comedy. But certainly the remaining cast--Spencer Conway, Jenny Diller, Sydney Folts and Lucy Smith--all have their moments. It may seem strange to read that a brilliantly conceived production finally fails for its last five minutes, but such is the case with this Ubu Roi. This writer has spent the good part of two days trying to puzzle out Creagle's motives for her ending, and though ruining a play's climax by revealing it is the province of my Oregonian colleagues, it must be done here to try and make sense of the play. At the end of Act V, Scene 2--before the Ubushites' escape to the sea--the child playing Giron shoots with a real gun the child who was playing Bordure. He is left on the playground dying, while his playmates enact the voyage of Ubu. But all the children become distraught by what's happened, save Ubu, and the play ends with them slouched and rocking in horror. What is Creagle wanting to say? Is this an attempt to explore that moment of agency in child development when the child becomes conscious of actions and consequences? If so, then isn't this rather damning of Jarry, who then becomes the creator of nothing but gratuitous mindlessness? Is Creagle wanting us then to "put away childish things"? Perhaps Creagle's intentions are more guileful. Jarry shocked a rational world with absurdity. Is Creagle merely countering by shocking our absurd age with rationality? But this is wholly self-defeating. The scatophilic exuberance of Jarry's lines may not jar us, but the structure of his play is still revolutionary. One need only go to the spectacle barns downtown to see that the "well-made play" is still the rule--work packed with "the virtues, patriotism and ideals of people who have dined well," to quote Catulle Mendès, one of Jarry's early advocates. In either case, Creagle's ending militates against both the play's purpose and Jarry's intentions by introducing a sour note of naturalism, the very thing Ubu Roi is a revolt against. The writer Roman Coolus was one of the few contemporaries of Jarry's who leapt into the post-première strife with a prophetic observation. "Jarry," he said, "has developed a kind of new theatrical language which merits further discussion." The discussion has led to Cocteau, the theories of Artaud and the Theater of the Absurd. Until the final moments of this production, Creagle pays praise to Jarry's riotous invention with an exciting continuation of that discussion. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published November 11, 1998