Michele Sereda is hoping to provoke the people who come to see the Curtain Razors production of Ubu Roi, but she most assuredly doesn't want - or expect, really - to elicit the reaction the play generated when it was first performed in Paris in 1896.
"The audience rioted for 15 minutes right after the play started," says Sereda, the director of the Curtain Razors version. "It was the first time they ever heard 's--t' said on stage. That's no big dead to us now - we head to us now - we hear it all the time - but the actor who played Pa Ubu, who had the first line in the play, had to do a song and dance to calm them down.
"And this was after the author, Alfred Jarry, had come out on stage in white makeup and his mother's white blouse and told them how they should respond to the play. They didn't like that much, either."
But Jarry loved it. The play thrust him into
But Jarry loved it. The play thrust him into the limelight as one of the most controversial and notorious - and influential - artists of his time. His constant blurring of the lines between theatre and performance art made him a revolutionary - and a natural choice for Curtain Razors.
"It really fits in with our mandate: 'What are the lines you can cross? What can you explore?'" says Sereda.
Ubu Roi is the first in a trilogy of Ubu plays; Jarry wrote it as a Punch and Judy type of puppet play in 1888 at the age of 15, and then adapted it into a stage piece.
< a stage piece."He deemed this his 'Everyman play,'" says Sereda. "Pa Ubu is married to Ma Ubu, and she puts the idea in his head he should assassinate the King of Poland and then they could be rich for the rest of their lives."
But the French playwright's view of Everyman was a dim one, indeed: "Pa Ubu's just a big, fat, stupid oaf," say Sereda. "The play focuses on greed, politics, religion, humanity - all seven of the deadly sins are in there."
Written as a response to the Industrial Revolution, the Ubu plays portray Everyman as vulgar, cruel, cowardly, gluttonous and crushingly stupid - another reasons the plays generated controversy wherever they were performed.
Sereda has updated the play a bit to reflect more of a technological revolution than an industrial one.
"It's our world 30-second sound bites," She says. >"It's our world 30-second sound bites," She says. "We're performing the piece out of order to represent the transience, the impermanence - the chaos."
Ubu Roi, which features Wayne Tunison, Michelle Dueck, Kris Alvarez, Danny Fortier and Scott Jones, opens Sept. 17 and runs for three consecutive nights at the MacKenzie Art Gallery Salon; all shows are at 8 p.m. Tickets - $12 for adults and $10 for members, seniors and students - can be picked up at the gallery gift shop, Buzzword Books, Pitch Cards & Curious or at the door.
The play carries a mature content warning. 
[ Back to Theater ]
Return to: Wayne's Home Page - Normal Version or - Shockwave Version
This page designed by Kent Chi Hou Chiu and Emily Wei Xu