Post on 02-Mar-2023
AUDIENCE CONTRACTS – Auditor
You, the audience, are provided, along with your programs, a single
sheet we will be asking you to follow and sign off on, when we’ve
covered a certain subject matter, or topic, with you. This provides
raw data to our scientific staff, who are charged with determining the
efficacy versing the entertainment value of tonight’s project. We’ll
be stopping periodically to ask you to initial individual points as
they are represented. Let’s practice: look at the sheet labeled
Audience Contract, there at the top of page one is a practice
statement. We’ll get to it momentarily, first listen attentively to
the statement I’m about to make… I am making the statement… now.
“Susan Sontag, who edited a collection of works by Antonin Artaud ,
Artaud being widely regarded as a highly influential theoretician for
theater practitioners of the late twentieth century and beyond, Sontag
states there that his ‘work denies that there is any difference
between art and thought, between poetry and truth… Artaud is someone
who made a spiritual trip for us… it would be presumptuous to reduce
the geography of Artaud’s trip to what can be colonized.’
Subsequent that I posit, that Jarry, Alfred Jarry made a spiritual
trip for Artaud, and should neither be reduced to that which can be
colonized, although he brought back several very nice souvenirs. Italics
mine.”
Now let’s read the practice statement. “Susan, a girl, says that
Artaud, a foreigner, went on a trip for us and somebody else went on a
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trip for him and we shouldn’t talk about his colon.” You’ll notice
there’s a short blank line after the statement… that’s where we need
you to mark your initials, indicating that you heard the words spoken
and then referenced therein. No other oath is implied by your
initials, although initialing will allow our scientists to count you
as someone who has learned something in the course of a theatrical
production. Failing to initial the statement allows our scientists,
here among us (people with clipboards and labcoats sitting in the audience kind of half-rise
and wave) to categorize you as someone who was entertained. There’s no
right answer, but all sheets must be turned in before you’re allowed
to exit the space or receive cultural credit. Wait, did some of you
people not bring pens…?
COMPOSITION OF THE ORCHESTRA
Woodwinds
Pipes/Melodicas
Bass
Piano Guitars (2)
Banjo
Accordion Trombone
Traps/Percussion
(Which play behind a raspy and distant female who sings… and throughout the entire show,
house band at the cabaret kind of feel…)
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Master of Ceremonies
There’s something of a law, an old saw, in theater, that if the
audience finds the protagonist, and the actor playing him, attractive,
then the audience is much more likely to engage positively with the
whole theatrical experience. Let’s take a gander at the brave young
man playing our hero tonight. (comes out with tissue in collar, trope of makeup being
put on…)
Jarry Actor
(espying the crowd) Oh, my god, you people are gorgeous… I can’t wait to do
this with you, I mean, I feel like you’re going to get my best… I can
feel your energy, and I just feed off of it… (licks fingers and blows a kiss)
Master of Ceremonies
Some patter related to the band and the person actually singing the song…
Pere Ubu’s Blues (Howlin Wolf: Backdoor Man)
Blood on my walls
Shit in my head
One more drink on the road to dead
I’ve got Pere Ubu’s blues…
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Automaton talk
Whitened face
There’s a puppet in my place
Pere Ubu’s blues
Shooting at strangers
Cycling around
We live in hell, the Ubu clown
Pere Ubu blues
(ragtime banjo) One thing bugs me
Makes me black
Got no nookie in the sack
Pere Ubu blues
Blood on my walls
Shit in my head
One more huff on the road to dead
I’ve got Pere Ubu’s blues, &etc.
(footlights)
CHARACTERS
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Auditor The Master of Ceremonies
Little Girl Alfred Jarry/The
Spaceman
Chanteuse Oscar Wilde
Monsieur Hebert, Physics Teacher Student
Actors (various) Fermin Gemier, the French Actor
Louise France, the French Actress Alastair Brotchie, Jarry
Biographer and Publisher
Jean-Martin Charcot, Neurologist W.B. Yeats, Irish Poet
Max Nordau, Physician and Social Darwinist A Disembodied Voice
Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician Bosse-de-Nage, a Butt-Cheeked
Baboon
Marcuiel, the SuperMale Pere Ubu
Mere Ubu The Palcontents
A Professor, Comparitive Lit Roger Shattuck, Jarry
Biographer and Scholar
A Goth Girl Theatre Student
Priest Pablo Picasso, Painter and
Charlatan
Guillaume Apollinaire, Poet Henri Rousseau, Naivist Painter
French Person 1/Dunou French Person 2/Demolder
Prostitute/Bougrelas Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Poet
and Theorist
Charlotte Jarry, Sister Jesse Helms, North Carolina
Senator
A Corporal Three Free Men
A Passer-Bye Woman Next-Door to Rachilde
Madame Rachilde, Novelist Bercail, the Fictional Sculptor
Berthe de Courriere, Nunnish Seductress Tinan, the novelist
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A Docent at the Jarry Museum Linda Klieger Stillman,
French and Jarry Scholar
Attendant, a Scientist, etc. A Spaceman
(A girl, a child, has been watching the Chanteuse sing Pere Ubu’s Blues, and, toward the end of
the song starts running back and forth across the stage saying “Goddamn, goddamn,
goddamn,” over and over and over…very intense. We assume she will grow up to be Ulrike
Meinhof)
M. Hebert
(a teacher lecturing a class of young students) You should love science, which has
made us so great, which has brought to our country an illustration
even more imperishable than that of military glory and its bloody
trophies; which has furnished the craftsman with a lightening of the
heavy burdens of his labor, and provides a vast improvement to all of
our lives, and yet can still elevate our souls and direct our thoughts
toward Heaven, by every day revealing to us the admirable order
established by the divine Creator of the Universe… (Alfred dies, quite
noticeably and dramatically, during this speech)
Student
Monsieur Hebert, the student Alfred Jarry, enrolled here at the Lycee
at Rennes, and present here in your class, has, during your lecture,
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succumbed to death and even now, has utterly failed to continue
breathing or pumping blood through his veins…
M. Hebert
O god, no, not another child dead due to my incomprehension of the
subjects that I teach and the sadistically boring method I have
developed of delivering my misinformation! Not more fodder for the
legendary schoolchild satires that feature me, me as a mealy-mouthed
reactionary clown terrified of my youthful auditors, trying to
overcome them with pompous verbosity, only to end inevitably in
sniffling and tears… o lord no, not another denigrating chapter in the
ongoing saga of Pere Hebe…
Student
Even as you speak M. Hebert, your student falls deeper and deeper into
the ruins of death, drifting further and further from our mortal coil…
Hebert
(in a special insidious light) This is just as we hoped… these children are
always teetering on the verge of anarchy and chaos, personal and
societal, and this Jarry is the worst of them – an ill mannered
connard du jack-off, a child with limited prospects and wandering
attention, questionable ideas, and who, despite my brilliant
performance which is almost always guaranteed to make them hate
learning, still wants to know things, and who even today has
publicized yet another marionette show in which a hideous figure,
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representing me, gets his zizi caught in something… a bicycle wheel or
a coffee grinder…
Jarry
(in a special insidious light, pedaling on his fixed wheel bicycle) This is just as I had
planned – while I appear dead, I am actually travelling in time,
traveling by channeling the wasted energy of the bourgeoisie. I have
created and powered this time machine, quite different in purpose from
that imagined by Wells, and explicit in its purpose – To remain
immobile in a given time… and there are two pasts that constitute all
time, the real past that lies beyond the future from the machine’s
point of view: the future is the normal sequence of events: an apple
hangs from the tree, it will fall. The past is a reverse sequence: the
apple falls – from the tree. The present is null. It is the tiniest
fraction of a phenomenon. Smaller than an atom. The size of a physical
atom is known, it is 1.5 x 10 to the minus 8 centimetres in diameter.
The past lies beyond the future because that’s where we find out what
happens. The future exists only by passing through the imaginary
present, thus creating all ethernity. The observer who lacks a time
machine sees time only stretching out from the half that he is in, the
past, in much the same way that the earth was first thought to be
flat. Duration, the function of this machine, is the transformation of
a succession into a reversion, I.E. the becoming of memory. It is in
time itself that bourgeois simpletons, ascendant at this moment, will
be defeated and destroyed.
Master of Ceremonies
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Although we haven’t mentioned it yet, the actual perpetual motion
food of Jarry and, therefore, his time machine, is alcohol, alcools.
His friend, the pornographer and wife of Mercure de France publisher
Vallette, Madame Rachilde, tells this story over and over in her
increasingly critical and conservative accounts of Jarry:
Rachilde
Okay, okay, I got it… I always liked the boy, but he opened the door
to an endless slew of Dadaists and Surrealists and Bolsheviks and
Trotskyites and anarchists, and how do you think I feel being
constantly defined as his “only female friend?” It’s bullshit, but
it’s the gig I’ve got going… Listen to this (pulls out a laminated paper and
reads):
Jarry began the day by imbibing two liters of white wine, three
absinthes spaced between 10 am and noon; then, at lunch, he
washed down his fish or his steak with red or white wine,
alternating with more absinthes. In the afternoon, a few cups of
coffee fortified with brandy or spirits of which I forget the
names; then, at dinner, after, of course, other aperitifs, he
could still tolerate at least two bottles of any vintage, of good
or bad quality. However, I never saw him really drunk, except
once when I aimed at him with his own revolver, which sobered him
up immediately.
No, no, I know that seems like the climax, the punchedy-punch line,
but wait… listen to this… Personally (yes, I am the referent here, as
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I am in all my stories) personally drinking nothing but absolutely
pure water (absolutely pure – how many of you are wondering where the
hell I got that in the middle of the fucking industrial revolution?
Dream on dreamers cause I’m not telling) so I’m personally drinking
nothing but absolutely pure water, it was ME whom Jarry considered a
frightful phenomenon: “You’re poisoning yourself Ma-De-Me,” he
explained to me, as serious as a heart attack, “Water contains, in
suspension, all the bacteria of heaven and earth, and your sweets,
which form your main nourishment, are spirits in a rudimentary state
that intoxicate in a completely different way than do spirits
expediently expunged of all their harmfulness by fermentation. All
sensible people understand that the use, and even more the abuse, of
fermented beverages is what distinguishes men from beasts.”
Goddamn, that’s a great story, but it gets better, it gets better, a
dozen or so years later, once again when I, personally drinking
nothing but the most fuckingly amazing pure fucking water whilst
stranded in a trapper’s cabin in a blizzard with the comic juggler W.C
Fields while on an ill-conceived tour of blizzard trapped water
producers in aught six across Canada when what did that bulbous-nosed
bastard slur at me but the now famous quote, “I never drink water.
Fish fuck in it.”
Hebert
(in his light) We, the upright, the obeyers, the dutiful, will prevail, and
it is in our rights to protect ourselves and our properties by
destroying those who would do us harm: honi soit qui mal y pense. We
are the chosen, we are the virtuous, we know what’s right! He deserves
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this, because he had potential, and he wasted it, wasted it by not
taking things seriously! Things are serious! Fuck Dreyfuss, fuck the
Commune, fuck egalite and fraternite… (he is led off the stage by the MC)
(little girls playing with Ubu marionettes, laughing)
Little Girl (same one as before, with 5 -6 others, all with puppets)
(playing the Ubu puppet, putting on a silly, robotic voice) O, no, mon membre viril is
caught in this bachelor machine! Merde, this hurts! O o o help me!
Putain de bordel! (they all laugh hysterically, chasing each other about with shittrsticks
and disembraining hooks and slapsticks and yell randomly, “Hurrah, godslegs, grab hold of the
big oaf…,” “Make mincemeat of the great blockhead, etc.”)
Ow! Ouch! I’m wounded, I’m holed, I’m perforated, I’m administered,
I’m interred! Oh, but all the same by Saint George and my green
candle, I’ve fallen and I’m riddled with kicks and I’m fleeing. Did I
mention my membre viril has had some door or other slammed on it?
(Hebert screams from offstage: “I hate children!)
Jarry
In this play, I will travel back and forth through time, your hero,
battling our enemies, those who believe in universal laws, religion,
and fixed identities. My sympathies are with the anarchists. Every
moment of every life is an exception. Every stimuli a powerful shock.
The modern world demands we live differently. Preciously. Astral and
terrestrial selves separate and go their own ways.
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Master of Ceremonies
Whoa! I should point out that what we’ve done is what most plays do,
we’ve dropped you into the middle of an ongoing story, actually dozens
of ongoing stories, in a time and place you’re not probably conversant
in. It’s time travel! Ha, ha. And exposition is your Dramamine!
This is a good time to stop and ask the audience if there are any
questions… about the play… are we following what’s going on, should we
clarify? First of all, I direct you to your voluminous programs, where
many of the characters and their relationships are spelled out for
you, along with certain statistics and facts which will contextualize
our performances.(answers questions as best as possible, using any resources necessary)
Here’s one of our actors, let’s check in with him and see how he
thinks the show is going…___, can you join me for a moment? ____,
ladies and gentlemen! ____, can you tell us how things are going from
your perspective? You’re obviously playing the role of Alfred Jarry,
how do you feel about your interaction with the audience?
Actor Jarry
Well I’m not sure they’ve gotten a firm picture of what’s going on,
and, while mostly I blame the playwright, I also blame the character,
Jarry, who was often intentionally difficult. How many of you would
like a recap with Italics Mine?
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Well first there was that great song, and then that little girl
stormed around cursing and you were supposed to get the idea that she
was going to grow up to be Ulrike Meinhoff because she was being
corrupted by ideas, but that’s idiotic because, as I’ve said over and
over, nobody knows who Ulrike Meinhoff is, it could be the
playwright’s cat for all we know, and then there’s this all important
set-up where M. Hebert, who was Jarry’s teacher and all the students
for years and years had been making fun of him and writing skits about
him and then Jarry came along and called “bullshit” and wrote Ubu all
about him but for the purposes of this play we’re supposed to believe
that a student got bored to death and created a time machine to escape
from the tedium of a class, which would be great, but really, who’s
got the energy for that? But they’re like life-long enemies now, and
we’re saying that it’s part of some monumental battle moving through
time itself between chaos and order or imagination and repression or
something and then that little girl comes back and says some really
nasty shit in French.
I’ve got to prepare, I’ve got a really big monologue coming up. Would
any of the other actors like to help explain all this to the audience?
(Hebert Actor comes out with a bottle of water)
You were great tonight, really on fire, I think we’ve got something
going.
Hebert Actor
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I totally improvised that last speech, fuck the commune and egalite
and fraternities and sororities, did you see their faces?... it just
totally felt right… (the actors exit)
Master of Ceremonies
Well, thanks for that insight, ____, and good luck with the rest of
the show, I’m sure we’ll talk again before it’s over.
Auditor
This would be the perfect opportunity to go to statement one on your
audience contracts, let’s find statement number one and read it,
“Alfred Jarry fell asleep in school to disobey, and subsequently
ruined a lot of good things, for all of us.” Initial or not to
indicate your reaction. Thank you.
The Master of Ceremonies
So let’s all remember that Jarry created a parody of his teacher call
Pere Ubu, which was produced first as puppet plays, and then in a
stage version at the Theatre De L’Ouevre, which is French for theater
of the opening, or a chasm in a body, or (airquotes) the Fermi Lab, and
open it did indeed, his most famous project , the work he’s remembered
for if at all, a legend in its own time, that he insisted on
introducing to the audience in a trenchant pre-show -- here comes our
hero, traveling, traveling through time and stopping, stopping and now
carrying things, what a workhorse ladies and gentlemen, bringing his
own table and chair, and, if I’m not mistaken, reading from
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handwritten notecards, The Preliminary Address at the First
Performance of Ubu Roi, December 10, 1896…
JARRY (awkwardly, like a small town toastmaster…)
Ladies and gentlemen,
It should be quite unnecessary (apart from being slightly absurd for
an author to talk about his own play) for me to come up here with a
few words before the production of Ubu Roi…
Master of Ceremonies (in a stage whisper)
O god, I’m sorry, really hate to interrupt, but can you get to the
interesting stuff?
Jarry (fumbling through his notecards)
… you are free to see in Mister Ubu as many allusions as you like, or,
if you prefer, just a plain puppet, a schoolboy’s caricature of one of
his teachers who represented for him everything in the world that is
grotesque...
Master of Ceremonies
(clearing throat) Anything better…?
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Jarry
We are going to make do… three complete acts, … two acts incorporating
some cuts… I have made all the cuts the actors wanted (… sacrificing
several passages essential to the understanding of the play), and for
their benefit… kept in scenes… would have been only too happy to
eliminate…
Master of Ceremonies (louder whisper)
Come on, start the show…
Jarry (continuing to shuffle cards nervously)
… we also have the ideal setting, for just as a play can be set in
Eternity by, say, letting people fire revolvers in the year one
thousand or thereabouts, so you will see doors opening onto snow-
covered plains under blue skies, mantelpieces with clocks on them
swinging open to turn into doorways, and palm trees flourishing at the
foot of beds so that little elephants perching on bookshelves can
graze on them.
(backdrop unfurls from the rafters, landing on Jarry and his table)
And the action, which is about to start, takes place in Poland, that
is to say, nowhere.
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(Fermin Gemier, dressed as the original live Ubu, next to Ma Ubu (Louise France), walks to
center stage.)
Gemier
Shittr
(Members of the audience murmer, begin to distress, shout, throw things, fruits and vegetables
in that classic I am against you Hernani way and fight each other. Time passes. Gemier dances
a jig to restore order)
Brotchie (reading from his book)
The truth is, it was not the profanity that set off the highly divided
audience, it was a later scene, when Ubu went to open a door, reaching
toward another actor, who held out his hand as a doorknob, which
Gemier mimed keying open and turning with the actor swinging
diagonally as a door, that finally drove the audience to the end of
their endurance, ending in a twenty minute highly theatricalized
battle between the supporters of Symbolism, though Ubu was hardly
that, and those fighting to protect the territory they had rioted to
support with Hernani and suchalike. It was Jarry’s manipulation of
theatrical convention, not his use of obscenity, that antagonized his
staid and self-chosen audience… actually, and nobody knew this for
years, he brought a very large group of his drinking companions from
the dive he frequented, Chez Ernest. They had been drinking heavily
before the show, and Jarry carefully instructed them to create a
disturbance no matter what – if the audience clapped, they were to
shout and throw vegetables; if the audience booed, they were to utter
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ecstatic cries of delight. In either case, Jarry instructed them to
riot, fight with their neighbors, throw things, insult people – he
evidently didn’t want the play to reach its conclusion. In his mind,
the audience, the provocation and response, was the actual
performance. Genius, and prescient.
Gemier
The play we have just performed was by Monsieur Alfred Jarry!
(The tumult resumes and intensifies, volleys of vegetables to the stage.)
Master of Ceremonies
How many of you were brought here by Jarry himself, to disrupt and
riot during the play?
(those throwing vegetables all raise their hands)
Bravo! Let’s hear it for the angry theater going crowd! Now that’s
what I mean when I say engaged! Why didn’t you people, a real theater
going audience, why didn’t you think to bring anything to throw? What
kind of Aristotelian zombies are you? Do you just simply not give even
the slightest dribble of a shit? What are you,status quo loving
necrophiliacs?
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Auditor
Now we have two statements, Two A and Two B, and you only need to
initial one of them: Statement A states, “Alfred Jarry made people mad
by putting bad words in his plays and on-stage.” Statement B says, “
Alfred Jarry angered people in his audience by defying what,
especially in France, were long established theatrical conventions.”
Initial your choice now. Thank you.
Jarry Actor
I am exhausted by that, but really, now that that’s over, the rest of
the evening is easy. For me, at least. I can time travel, I don’t
have to spend eternity in a theater… ha, you rubes. You have free time
and disposable income and you’re here, crapping up my performance with
your inappropriate and insincere responses and short attention spans
and cell phones and sleepy eyes…
O, god, look at you people, you look like I just stepped on your
lapdog and squished his insides out his mouth and ass… Ha! Just
getting into character!
Well, actually, and this is no secret, it’s a long standing theatrical
convention for the actors, out of real fear and dismal social standing
and an over-dramatized antagonism, to just hate the audience – really,
just think how lovely our evening would be if you weren’t sitting
there in judgment of us, or rehashing stupid conversations you had at
work five hours ago, making ugly faces about something else that we of
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course think are about how much you don’t appreciate or respect or
understand us.
And if you act like you love us, it feels patronizing. Why can’t you
just appreciate how hard we all work and thank us with your eyes and
by listening? (Salpetriere attendant whacks him with a blackjack and prepares him for
examination by Charcot and Nordau)
Master of Ceremonies
The Great Minds of the Nineteenth Century Critique M. Jarry! First,
Jean-Martin Charcot, Neurologist, in fact the Babe Ruth of Neuroses,
and Presenter of Hypnotized Women to the Delight of All Male
Audiences! Charcot!
Charcot
A male suffering from the female disorder of hysteria, Alfred Jarry
presented his childish puppet play Ubu Roi with a human cast; five acts
of shrieking, cursing, and waving toilet brushes mostly at the
audience, an audience divided between the waning profligates of the
romantic bohemia, and the more jaded and critical members of the
Symbolist proto-modernist hierarchy, one of whom, the Irishman William
Butler Yeats, characterized the event with appropriate melancholy:
Yeats
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Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for
the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for
comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say,
“After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Puvis de
Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle rhythms, after
the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the
Savage God.”
Master of Ceremonies Quick cut to Max Nordau, Ladies and Gentlemen! Perpetuator of Cesare
Lombroso’s eugenic concept of criminal physiognomies and social critic
who believed that all modern art and artists are degenerate and
ultimately unable to cope appropriately with the world around them!
Tell us what you think of the venerable Yeats!
Nordau
The last sentence is eminently quotable and has been used for more
than a century by the Alfred Jarry aggrandizement machine to market
the image of artist as alcoholic queer madman, obtuse and unable to
connect to the march of progress and the wholesome act of being human…
all of which is absolutely true… artists are, by their very nature,
nervous degenerates…
Yeats
Fuck you, da…
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(someone in the cast, stage whispers, “o my god, its Oscar Wilde!)
Oscar Wilde
(monumentally melodramatic) Speak you for these attendees? Are you seeking
sympathy? Seriously? Yeats, you woodbooger. “After Puvis de
Chavannes?” After all our subtle rhythms?” You express what, comrade?
The qualities of a sod-filled mattress? Are you not merely the ominous
and histrionic foreshadowing of a reactionary outrage at those not
privileged enough to express themselves, uttered in a fake howl while
you cleverly present yourself as the last bastion of an ass-kissing
avant-garde struggling to maintain the status quo while insisting on
your own status as a victim?
(They fight with pen and shittr brush, provided by the Palcontents, Punch and Judy style, Yeats
eventually pinning Wilde)
Alright, alright, Uncle! I’ll embrace my status as queer dandy and and
stop thinking so critically about everything… oow… alright, I’m
serious… let me go…
Auditor
Let’s look at statement three and initial it or not – you know why…
“Pedants are okay if we agree with them, but Oscar Wilde was the bad
kind.”
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Disembodied Voice
And so we look down at the last days of Planet Earth, the blue, or
possibly the green, Planet, where Alfred Jarry, a troubled, but spunky
young man from Laval, ignites the profanity laden self-immolation of
civilization by unleashing his superheroes on the unsuspecting and
immature minds of people reeling from the sucker-punch of Darwinism
and the gut-shots of anti-social deviance and degeneracy. Alfred Jarry
time travels to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City!
Jarry
(like a carnival talker, a wrestling announcer…) Jeepers gee and hornstrumpet too,
the most important thing is getting this world back right, to where
ideas and imagination reign supreme over the greengrocers and mine-
owners who want to tell everyone how not to think… So I’m bringing out
my boys! – the quinze merdres, the phynancial phyve… IT’S
DISEMBRAINING TIME!!! First, a scientist who can shake a green candle
and avoid creditors like an Icarus, Dr. Faustroll…!!!
Dr Faustroll
(stomping and posing, the Auditor’s scientists gathering around all of the phyve like they’re the
Beatles landing at LaGuardia, except there’s a certain phrenological/physiomonical process
going on)
Science is here to clear it all up – god is the shortest distance
between zero and infinity. In which direction, one may ask, and we
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shall reply that his first name is not Jack, but plus-or-minus, and
one should say that plus or minus god is the shortest distance between
zero and infinity, in either direction. Pataphysics is the science! (all
wrestler like – a scientist passes out from the confrontation)
Jarry
What concrete power can you bring to our battle, Dr?
Faustroll
I am the master of imaginary solutions, and I know how to not die!
Jarry
Huzzah! Quince Merdres numero deux, the constant companion of Dr
Faustroll, the dog faced,hydrocephalic baboon, Bosse- de-Nage, the
azurine and scarlet cheeks of his butt transmitted to his face cheeks
by the Dr, a creature with the ability to destroy enemies, reward
allies, and critique any situation through the quick use of language,
usually, in French, confined to two words, or one word, repeated…
revealing both the ultimate unity and duality of all he has mastered:
Bosse-de-Nage
Ha-ha!
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Jarry
Merdre trois, a master of the physical and erotic and infinite, Le
Surmale!!!
Marcuiel
I have realized that, in these days when metal and machines are all
powerful, man, if he is to survive, must become stronger than the
machines, just as he became stronger than the beasts… so that when
they wired me to a dynamo and ran eleven thousand volts through my
skull, I reversed the direction of the charge, stopping the
electricity from changing me and throwing it all back at the machine,
causing the machine to FALL IN LOVE WITH ME and melt to nothingness!
I can also have sex 82 times in a row, should it come to that (to a
member of the audience, a mimed, “call me”).
Jarry
Last, but not at all the least, Merdres quartre et quinze, the
collective Palotins (who rush on like an acrobatic act, waving shitbrushes and various
debraining devices, yowling lost boys and girls), vicious lapdogs of regicidal,
patricidal revolution, and the veritable anti-Hebe, Pere Ubu, their
leader and king, often made even more powerful by the presence of the
Mere Ubu…
Ubu
26
Shitter
Mere
Oooo, what a nasty word. Pere Ubu, you’re a nasty old man.
Ubu
Watch out I don’t bash your brains in, Mere Ubu!
Mere
It’s not me you should want to do in, old Ubu, o no! It’s someone
else.
Ubu
By my green candle, I don’t understand.
Mere
You mean you’re content with your lot, you bamboozle faced idiot?
Ubu
27
By my green candle, shitter, Madam. Yes, by god, I’m perfectly
satisfied. Who wouldn’t be? O, that’s quite enough from you. Come
here, sloven, and kneel before your master. You are about to undergo
the worst torture.
Mere
Ow, ow, ow Mister Ubu!
Ubu
Have you quite finished with your ow, ow, ows? Because now, I’m going
to begin: twisting of the nose, tearing out of the hair, penetration
of the nearoles by the little wooden pick, extraction of the brain
matter by way of the heels, laceration of the posterior, partial or
even total suppression of the spinal marrow (thus confirming that the
subject is a spineless creature), not to mention the puncturing of the
swimming bladder! How does that suit you, puddinghead?
Mere
How stupid can you get?
Ubu
Shittabugger, and buggerashit, what are you talking about Madame
pfartarole?
28
Mere
It’s time we finished off the whole bunch of phynanciers and nobles
and counselors and the evil eggheads and took power for ourselves,
Ubu. Why shouldn’t you install yourself in their place? You could eat
as many bangers as you liked and get yourself an umbrella and a
greatcoat that would come down to your feet…
Ubu
To war! Death to order, death to the bourgeoisie! I’ll stamp on their
feet and yell shit, and that will be our signal to hurl ourselves on
them!
Mere Ubu
Fart, shittr, it’s hard to get him moving, but, fart, shittr, I reckon
I’ve shaken him all the same! Thanks to god and myself, in a week,
maybe, I’ll be Queen of Poland!
Palcontents
Hurrah arsehorns, long live Pere Ubu!
Mere Ubu
There’s only one way out, Pere Ubu.
Ubu
29
What’s that my love?
Mere Ubu
War!!
Palotins
Great god, how noble! Hurrah for war!! Long live Poland! Long live
Pere Ubu!
Ubu
Ah! Mere Ubu, give me my breastplate and my little bit of earens-pick
wood. I shall soon be so weighed down that I shouldn’t be able to walk
even if I was being chased.
Mere Ubu
Pooh! What a coward!
Ubu
Ah! Here’s the saber of shittr running away, and the phynancial hook
that won’t stay put… and now the earens-pick has fallen down… methinks
I’ll killen them with the shittr hook and the cut throat!
30
Mere Ubu
Isn’t he handsome with his helmet and breastplate, he looks like an
armed pumpkin. Good luck M. Ubu, good luck killing the bourgeoisie!
Ubu
You bet. Wringing of the nose and teeth, extraction of the tongue, and
driving of the little bit of wood into the earens! Hornsgibolets!!
Professor
Like the short lived Roast Suckling Rebellion in 1945 Europe, Alfred
Jarry assembled a dedicated and arcanely talented group at his deaths
in 1893 (the year of his mother’s death), 1897 (the beginning of legal
proceedings seeking payment for his bicycle and his eviction from
Calvary, his apartment at Calvaire du Trucide), 1903 (when his gun was
taken from him, and 1907 (when his physical body died quite
convincingly), a group gathered to work with him, both on earth and in
the pataphysical realm, while moving across time, to work with him on
the absolute destruction of the hierarchical world that surrounded and
oppressed him and, so he assumed, those around him. The first and one
of the most successful tactics in the war was the creation of the
Jarry death myth, how he self-destructed, “death by hallucination”
said one noted scholar, the ultimate sacrifice to the image of the
romantic artist, and to self-immolation, the madness of creation.
This certainly attracted those who knew the truth about the inner
31
rings of knowledge, for example, Marcel Duchamp and Artaud, but for
the broader audience, he simply became a sympathetic failure…
His army hid behind death, sneaking toward their enemies in the
darkness, in their tireless effort to revolutionize life itself…
Auditor
Statement 4: “I know who the Phynancial Phyve are.” Our scientists
need your affirmation, or, conversely, your negation. Both help us
out!
Master of Ceremonies
Ladies and Gentlemen, what an incredible, incroyable, piece of luck
tonight, to have a real live public intellect and Jarry scholar here
in the audience! Let’s give it up for Roger Shattuck, everybody!
Roger Shattuck
Hello, my name is Roger Shattuck, and I wrote a book entitled The
Banquet Years at a time when the newest bohemians of the hippy
generation were looking for precedent saints, and find them they did,
in my book, The Banquet Years, wherein I gave slick, short, anecdote
filled biographies of Jarry, and three of his fin de siècle
32
counterparts, the painter Rousseau, the poet Apollinaire, and the
composer Satie. The nouveau counter culturists ate it up, of course
they never fact checked, and they actually seemed to prefer the legend
stories to the truth. Partly because of that, now I’m a reactionary
prig who wonders over the course of numerous books whether everyone
even deserves knowledge, or should we reserve it for those capable of
maintaining and honoring it, or we should just be agnostic regarding
all the problematic, pornographic, disturbia belched out by the post-
modernists at the expense of the classics. People just use it the
wrong way.
I’m not proud exactly of what I wrote about Jarry. Here’s an example
of the dreck a lot of us were producing in the late sixties and early
seventies: “He tricked us by being dreamy and fascinating and working
really hard and dying from diseases indicative of poverty and by
trying to warn us about a repressive shitstorm of self-serving middle
class ideologies.”
Now I know he was a jerk-off and most of what I wrote was to appeal to
jerk-offs.
Goth and Hippy Girls
(running across stage… the same girls, grown some, from the puppet playing)
Oh my god, Alfred’s dying, and it’s sooooooo beautiful… he had owls…
he drank ether… he wore women’s shoes and a painted tie to Mallarme’s
funeral… he fished for his only food… he acted like a robot… he
smoked hash and drank absinthe and ether… he had pet owls who lived in
his apartment with him and flew in and out his windows… he walked the
33
streets of Paris with a carbine over his shoulder… Picasso followed
him like a little dog… he was discharged from the Army for ‘precocious
imbecility’… he could walk into any dingy bar in the world and by the
end of the night be everyone’s hero, their best friend… he was so
alone… I wanna be with him in ethernity…. (commit group suicide with a liquid
poison)
Shattuck
(pointing at them with a pointer) Thousands of children were drawn to his works
because of his sadly beautiful death… most totally unaware of his
radical agenda, and almost none able to comprehend his byzantine
language. For them, he simply died young and left a beautiful, anti-
authoritarian corpse behind, chock full of drugs and shocking
immorality.
Theater Student
(sitting up from the group suicide) He revolutionized the theatre with his use
of puppets and signs and profanity and bodily functions that nobody
else ever even thought of … and his way of using language to say
things in some all – Symbolisty way that no one can understand, that’s
what’s so wonderful… even his stage directions infuriated the stuffed-
shirts…
Shattuck
34
I met death. I flew Combat Cargo over Hiroshima, and death saved my
life. I know death, but Jarry’s acolytes do not. They believe it is
his dying, at 34, not a Christ, but close, his choice to poison
himself slowly and assuredly that is so intensely attractive and
meaningful, along with his steadfast rejection of traditional society
and authority. He was not, like The Little Prince, too beautiful to
live. Refer if you will, to my compendium of things which are, like
the Little Prince, too beautiful to live, and so, are dead. Alfred
Jarry is not among the numbered 407,118. His death in the alembic has
left him forever vulnerable to the enemies who seek to destroy him
still, because of it… because of his actual humanity…
Priest
Jarry thought he was dying last year (1906 for those of you following
along the time-space continuum), and asked for Extreme Unction… he got
it, but Jesus had his fingers crossed, the sucker, the hypocrite, let
him rest in hell… let him be punished for his inequities… let him suck
my dick… let him stick his finger up my ass and lick it a little then
put it in my mouth… let him get his head stuck in a hole in the wall
over at the rectory and require burning incense and beeswax candles to
set him free… let him wiggle like an earthworm revealed from under a
rock… let him be bitten by a rattlesnake and require someone to suck
the poison out… let him need forgiveness or human kindness in some
wicked bad kind of way…
35
Master of Ceremonies
He recovered and died later, voiding the agreement…
Priest
(A hideous puppet with multiple arms, holding a water glass of wine, a whip, his dick, a Bible,
underwear, a kissable scarf what are those things called again?, a chalice, a host…)
You’re wrong you little bitch, about everything, no, no, no, I’m
melting, I’m melting…
Auditor
Let’s all initial number five: “something wicked just happened.”
Master of Ceremonies
But yes, it is his dying that stands out as a very pronounced coda to
a performance of life, not a natural life, but a performed one, and
one that attracts malcontents, patrons of the pipe, and queers in all
the meanings of the word to this day… and tonight, we present the
Death of Alfred!, a spectacle of the first order presented at no small
expense or risk to both performer and audience for the sole purpose of
thanking this oft-misunderstood man-child, potache, for his work of
over 15,000 written, not just doodled on pages, friend and tutor to
the greats, the immortals, a poet, engraver, soldier, critic,
playwright, novelist, publisher, bicyclist, philosopher, alcoholic,
marksman, artist, editor, fisherman, and naturalist all at or above
36
the most magnificent heights, on All Saints Day, 1907, calling into
question ever so briefly his chosen state of immortality!
Audience Member
Wait, are we supposed to sympathize with this man?
Master of Ceremonies
No, but he is our hero.
Ladies and gentlemen, please reach under your seat for the special
glasses required to properly view this scene! It is he, I now present
to you, ladies and gentlemen, each and everyone alone, the long
absinthe, Alfred Jarry…!!! Wait, what? There are no glasses?
Bugafuckashittr! Now you’ll never see the bed falling!
Somebody backstage is gonna pay for this! Dammit. The Death of Jarry!
(storms off)
(Surely there will be some expulsion of air, of pain and relief from Alfred’s lungs, and he begins
to breathe more quickly and shallowly, until a certain volume is attained, at which time a
rhythmic beating on the sternum becomes the background to death by tubercular meningitis.)
Jarry
37
We awoke this morning and we could not move our legs. Two men knock at
the door. We reply that “we are coming.” Ha ha. Ha.
The mind jumps up to champion the task of allowing visitors to enter
but the body lies broken in the aftermath of a frenzied and hideous
dance. The body is the dead beast with which the mind has fornicated
and now wishes to reject. The body is the… All the while the men
pound on the entrance to the Grand Chasublerie… (sternum solo) … One last
one last audience: Go away. Pere Ubu has slain the pretender Alfred
with the shit brush of justice. Our precious person insists you leave.
Bastards bastards bastards impossibly seeking to slow the explosive
dreams without absinthe, without hashish, without ether, just dream
the dream and die, just dream death… just dream dead…
It is necessary to kill the beast with which one has fornicated… If
man escapes the wild beasts, he finds death in the broiling deserts,
in the terrible ocean… the brain, during decomposition, continues to
function and its dreams are our paradise.
the knocking on the door, the knocking to gain admittance, begging
without knowing the uselessness of the dead body, a world without end,
for ether and ether amen, continues…
The knocking on the door goes on and on even after we pronounce that
“We are coming” which we have neither said nor done in a very long
time, time now gone…
Pere Ubu, having become an atom in transition, watches the violation…
idolators holding the mind hostage in the body.. . having asked all
38
questions and divining all answers within the realm of exceptions, we
speak now of life, commonly called the Bitch…
(He sits up, and declares, as though in a health film:) My decline is not caused by
drink nor hallucinogens… I have merely forgotten to eat for the past
year or so. (drops back down)
Je cherche. Je cherche. (over and over with the sternum beating…)
Bring me a toothpick.
(Someone does. Alfred laughs insanely [like Bosse-de-Nage, HA Ha] and dies.)
(The body lies there, chairs are set around it, and Picasso, the Douanier Rousseau, and
Apollinaire enter and sit and stare. Picasso draws doodles.)
Auditor
Quick, answer yes or no by initialing one of the following: Statements
Six A and B: “What’s more important, a person’s behavior, or a
toothpick?” Initial, don’t think!
Card Girl
(carries card stating “Jarry’s Paris Wake!”)
Picasso
39
So he was a fairy right… I never saw him do any fairy stuff, but he
was a faggot. I coulda kicked his ass any day…
Apollinaire
Didn’t you follow him around like a little dog, carrying a carbine,
like he did, the entire winter of 1904, the whole time you were
fucking Fernande over? It was embarrassing when I introduced you to
him and you glommed on to him like a lovesick leech… “That’s brilliant
Monsieur Ubu… you are the only one who sees and speaks the truth Pere
Alfred… O tell me tell me tell me, should I use those African masks to
create flattened and multiple perspective pieces of shit…?” He said
yes to make you disappear and stop following him… he couldn’t even
piss without you starting to talk…
Picasso
You took his revolver away from him when he was drunk and shooting at
Manolo the sculptor and gave it to me to hold…
Apollinaire
So…?
Picasso
40
I never gave it back to him and I’m going to keep it until I’m an old
man in the 1960’s and then sell it to someone who worships him as much
as I pretended to, for 3.2 million dollars, and, and you you stupid
poet cunt, I’m going to draw on plates and sell them for thousands of
dollars and anyplace I take a shit I’m going to sign my name in mierda
on the wall and everytime I do it, they’re going to turn the bathroom
and the house it’s in into a fucking museum, and I’m going to screw
people I hate by turning their fucking houses into museums cause I
wrote my name in shit on their bathroom walls and then I’m going take
all the money that people give me to scribble on anything they give me
and pay everybody in the world to line up and touch my puta and say
something sweet to it…
Apollinnaire
You are such an asshole Pablo, I wish I’d never promoted you, I wish I
really stole the Mona Lisa and burned down the Louvre, but I’m glad
I’m going to die of the Spanish Flu in 1918 before you defile the
whole art world with your assholery…
Rousseau
So why then did you treat me cruelly and so misuse Alfred’s affection
for you? Why did you tell the world that he discovered me painting by
the Seine and publicized me as a joke, an elaborate ruse to mislead
the bourgeoisie? He liked my paintings, and, when he was evicted from
his lodgings in 1897, I let him sleep with me in my bed rather than in
the street. We were Lavalese… brothers… the day we met, I was painting
a self portrait next to the river and he suggested that I represent
41
myself floating above the ground… it was brilliant and beautiful… no,
that’s bullshit, we lived in the same neighborhood and talked. We were
normal people. He liked my art. He introduced collectors and critics
to my work, he wrote a piece in the Mercure about me, because of him,
I am in art history and not just considered a lunatic playing with
paint. He was a lost young man, but kind and helpful… my whole family
grew to love him… I painted a portrait of him with his owls and
chameleon, and people thought it was a portrait of a woman. He burned
it all except for his face. He kept that.
Picasso
As soon as he died I bought a dozen of your paintings, and I’m going
to keep them until the 1930’s and then sell them for a thousand fold
profit you old fool… god, if only I could get that piece of canvas
with his face on it, a million fold profit, and Douanier, why is your
perspective so terrible, why are your foregrounds so big and all the
lions and tigers so tiny…?
Rousseau
Shut up. This is a nice man who is dead, a young man, that none of us
should have outlived. He should have shot you both for your
falsehoods. You, Apollinaire, you write better than you are. You’re
lucky to be right, to write well, once in a while, but it’s never
because you work at it. You, Picasso, you’re the worst kind of
loathsome fake artist. You’re not good enough to wash Alfred’s feet…
Picasso
42
His filthy little fairy feet…
Rousseau
His feet that connected him to this earth and to places and times and
movement (he weeps grandiously).
Master of Ceremonies
I am not speaking as the Master of Ceremonies now, I am my own person,
sharing what I feel – the people we use to define culture used Alfred
Jarry to define culture, yet they prevented us from knowing him…
Auditor
Initial now! Statement Seven: “Pablo Picasso never got called an
asshole.” Not by you. Go go, now! And for those of you at home
playing the Velvet Underground drinking game version of the show, the
correct answers are John Cale, and, Mo Tucker’s favorite dog command!
Disembodied Voice
Let us now ride the river of the Douanier’s tears to La Seine and
upstream 21 miles to the south, where a very different wake is being
held in the riverside village of Le Coudray, where the locals have
colorful names like Baked-Apple, Goat-Butter, Egg-Yellow, Slacker,
Smashed, Gingerbread, The Bandage, The Eye, Yelper, Skinflint, Rat’s
Arse, Yellow-Foot, The Snake, Cat’s Nose, Love-en-route, The Beard aka
43
Bigtache, The Fly, Owl, Look-Below, Bellyache, The Bleak, and Oil-
Stone. In reality, their names are in French, like Mal-au-Ventre, Cul-
de-Rat, Pomme Cuite, and Grandes-Moustaches. Unfortunately no one
knows what those words mean, because they are in French.
And so we join the primitive fishermen and stevedores and smugglers as
they remember their magical friend and fellow traveler, Alfred Jarry!
French Person 1 Interpreter
Comment vous vous appellez? We are simple people
French Person 2 Interpreter
Je m’appelle Cul-de-Rat, et vous? When M. Jarry
arrived, we thought he would be
aloof, would think he
was better than us…
French Person 1 Interpreter
Je m’appelle Mal-au-Ventre, enchante. He
was a professional writer, with a bicycle
to transport him through
time and space
44
French Person 2 Interpreter
Quelle est votre profession? He had an almost miraculous
ability to catch fish at any
time, any place in the river,
even where none of us, who lived
here all our lives, had found
fish before
French Person 1 Interpreter
Je suis contrabandier, et vous? He was shy and sweet, but he
laughed very hard when we made
jokes or passed gas
French Person 2 Interpreter
Je suis pecheur. All of our wives and daughters
found him gallant… he would
compliment them on the most
ordinary of things, but he was
sincere
45
French Person 1 Interpreter
Vous etes marriee? He held our little children in
his arms and made them laugh,
they would reach out to him when
he came in the room
French Person 2 Interpreter
Oui, je suis marriee. Et vous? He would ride them on the
handlebars of his bicycle
French Person 1 Interpreter
Non, je ne suis pas marie, je suis celibataire. His eyes were a
blue million miles
Mais, j’ai une petite amie. Elle s’appelle
Pomme Cuite.
French Person 2 Interpreter
Ca va Alfred Jarry? What happened to M Jarry?
French Person 1 Interpreter
46
Il est morte. Tres morte. Il est defunt. (cries) He died, thank
goodness. He died before all of
us learned what he had found at
the intersection of life
and death…
Auditor
I have to stop here, and ask you to initial statement eight, “What
I’ve just seen is very true, the people who weren’t writers that
Alfred Jarry hung out with in working class dives and wharves and
stables and bicycle shops thought he was just fine, a good guy, not an
effete artist, but a sincerely thoughtful and funny person. They were
in on his joke. They knew culture was pulling a fast one on them.
I’m sorry, I can’t even tell if this play is for him or against him.
Is it so hard? Initial.
Disembodied Voice
Even now, where I am, in the future, no one knows what any of these
sounds made by French people mean. This is a major blow to our love
for and scholarship about Alfred Jarry, since, for reasons probably
related to his misanthropy, he spoke only in French. Except once,
when he was overheard to say the English phrase “greek hair style” in
describing Oscar Wilde’s head.
It is my duty now to explain that we, the engineers of the future, are
actively interpreting the past, in this case the past related to
Alfred Jarry and one person’s feelings about him, using technology and
47
many other things to find out stuff that happened and tell you about
them.
You are getting sleepy. When you awake you will be attending a
performance that you find yourself loving, about Alfred Jarry, whom
you cherish deeply. You will be filled with good will toward all
involved in the production, offering them financial stability and
honor and foods made with grass fed beef and will, forever into your
future, support the arts, organizing five K runs for them, encouraging
children and even adolescents to do them, and supporting legislation
to provide for elderly artists when they become senile, often at a
disturbingly early age. When I snap my fingers, a new character will
be introduced. (snap)
The Spaceman
Hello, I’m a spaceman called The Spaceman. I’m here, traveling in time
from the future, to observe the characters in this play and to help
you understand them by changing the language they speak. Let me
summarize: I am traveling in time, and will act as needed, as your
guide. The most important thing, and what always remain foremost in my
mind, is that I can in no way change the course of events, because
that would change the future, possibly creating a dystopic world, or a
world where my parents never have sex with each other, and I cannot
exist.
Look! Rural French people! I will imagine their conversations and
share them with you, the people I imagine to be the audience!
48
Hello! How do you call yourself?
French Person 1
I am called myself, Mister Dunou, and you?
The Spaceman
I am the one called by the name of The Spaceman.
French Person 1
Hello.
The Spaceman
Hello. Does this change anything for you, knowing that I am a spaceman
from the future come to your time to observe and give meaning to your
actions, your language, to the people of my time, a time in the
distant future when the world is made up largely of passive consumers
seeking comfort by watching lives like yours while I ascribe imaginary
motivations to you and your loved ones, a created history if you will…
do you think this will change how you had planned to live your life.
French Person 1
49
Oui.
The Spaceman
If only I understood his primitive vocalizations. (French Person 1 holds up a
flashcard that says oui on one side and yes on the other, nods his head yes vigorously.) Yes?
Yes?! O no, now my parents will never engage in successful copulation,
nor will they even ever be trapped on a ferris wheel in the fog
through a bone-shatteringly cold Breton night together, and I, The
Spaceman, will never be born, much less mentor a dog to be named Toby
the Extraordinary who may or may not be the first Soviet dog to land
on the moon, marking the flag and space trash of the Americans with
his urine, urine which will remain unsmelled and un-urined over for
all eternity due to changes in imperialist agendas.
Damn me, for being a tool of interventionist biology and manipulative
governance and reality-focused entertainment. Because I am, I cease to
exist, and am now not, nor can ever be... (The Spaceman explodes, or
something, but is gone in smoke and flame.)
French Person 1/Monsieur Dunou
(espying him) Zut alors! C’est Monsieur Alfred Jarry!
Alfred Jarry
50
(pedaling furiously on his immobilized bicycle, being pulled across the stage by the one who
looks and sounds like Bosse-de-Nage, then disembikes) Bonjour Monsieur Dunou! I
have played an immense joke on you by presenting myself as the one who
is called by the name of The Spaceman! Ca va Demolder! Let us drink!
(the three men consume a bottle or two of absinthe – this takes a long time, there is a ritual to
it, the dripping of water, clear, over a spoon of sugar, into the absinthe, beautiful)
Demolder
Why, Alfred, are you pretending to be a time traveler who is known by
the name of The Spaceman?
Jarry
I am not pretending. I am, as you have heard, dead, and also,
traveling perpetually in time, an act that is both a tribute to the
writer H.G.Wells,and to my mastery of the science of Pataphysics.
Since 1898, I am present more in random points of time than I have
ever been in my own life, and, because my presence at any given point
of time is not exclusive, I am always existing in an infinite set of
moments, with wildly varying degrees of integration with my
surroundings.
Dunou
51
Why would you want to travel through time, rather than simply being
present in the now?
Jarry
I can drink more if I can drink everywhere I have ever drunk
endlessly. I travel to be with you and my friends here in this bar in
Le Coudray, at Le Grands Temps, to protect you as best I can…
Demolder
What the fuck, Alfred, protect us?
Dunou
Protect us from what?
Jarry
From the powers, the people, who would package you and send you to
death to protect buildings and borders and who would destroy your
thoughts, your happiness, and cause you to want more than can be
wanted, to believe that desire is possibly rewarded, velvet nooses and
fatty geese… the things I can’t yet protect myself from… because I
have not yet mastered the being in and leaving moments of time.
At this moment, I am both here and paying for sex but not having it
with the young male prostitute I wish would play a role in my play,
Ubu Roi, the part of the vengeful 14 year old child of the king slain
52
by the usurper Ubu who gathers an insurgent army to overthrow the
monstrous pretender… I will always love you, my comrades, never
forget.
Docent at the Jarry Museum
(polo shirt and khakis and a pith helmet) O, o, o, I think I can help everybody
here, at this point, what’s being shown here is the essential nature,
the “contradictions” of M Alfred Jarry – a brilliant intellect,
equally comfortable/discomfortable sharing a drink with the
impoverished possibly diseased deformed neighbors and/or smoking
hashish to better spectate/enjoy a 13 year old male prostitute… I
finally get it, he’s traveled back in time to 1896, but is talking on
the phone to the innovative director Lugne-Poe.
Jarry (on a cell phone, like its Jarman’s Edward II)
Aurelien, sweetheart, let me tell you why I’m convinced about this
idea of having a young lad in the role of Bougrelas: I know one in
Montmartre who is very good-looking, with amazing eyes and curly locks
right down his back. He is thirteen and reasonably intelligent,
provided he’s given enough attention. It might be a real fillip for
Ubu, get the old ladies excited and create a bit of a scandal;
whatever happens it will make people sit up; it’s never been tried
before and I do believe that the ‘Oeuvre’ should have the monopoly of
all innovations… (puts phone down and draws)
53
Prostitute/Boogerlas
Would you stop looking at me… I don’t act, I’m not a spectacle, I do
things, I do real things. Actors pretend and I am real… Is that why
you can’t just have sex with me like a normal TANTOUSE? I don’t know
why I let you smoke hashish and just stare at me… but it’s your
dispensation… your money feels just like any money when I rub it on my
body after you’re gone and I’m alone laughing at you and how you can’t
do anything… you’re just a pretender, a pretending person…
Jarry
You’re so pretty with the patterns radiating from you, the geometry of
your love… I stare and try to imagine how to represent you without
corrupting you through representation, without bearing a false witness
to you… how can I convince others what I felt when I touched you? How
could they possibly know? Did you know that other people don’t feel
this way? Lugne-Poe won’t give me the money to hire you for the play,
and I can’t afford to gaze upon you privately any longer…
Prostitute/Bougrelas
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You’re a failure who very soon won’t have the money to even enter my
room, while I have 10 more years easy to take advantage of the
affections of les pedes like you? And 10 more years for old rich
putes and then I’ll do the Rimbaud.
Jarry
(caressing him) Why do you want to talk to me like this, when I debase
myself so totally to be with you…
Prostitute/Bougrelas
(pulling him close, kissing him hard)Because Hebert was already here, and I want
the pretty, satisfying things that the powerful give off…
Jarry
I have powers untold, and will instigate a revolution that will make
our love possible…
Prostitute/Bougrelas
There’s no revolution going to save you or make you happy and I don’t
want to suck your stupid pretty dreams out of your sick and floppy
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dick. I don’t want a revolution, I want what’s in the shops this
season…
Jarry
Does this mean you won’t perform in Ubu?
Prostitute/Bougrelas
Hebert says no. And I have a date with Marinetti tonight…
Marinetti
(played butch by a woman, and dancing with Prostitute/Bougrelas) His future runs over
him with my car, driving at a thousand miles an hour with jazz bands
playing in the backseat while I caress every inch of you and smoke you
in with my foot slammed down on the pedal in a world where we drive in
cars from monument to monument to push them over.
Prostitute/Bougrelas
I’m in your power, totally.
Marinetti
No, no, no, say the other one…
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Prostitute/Bougrelas
Isn’t it pretty to think so…
(they kiss, and the Prostitute sinks down to his knees as the lights change…)
Marinetti
That’s the one.
Master of Ceremonies
We’re stopping here, because none of you need to be subjected to yet
another diatribe against Italian Futurism, the interior design of
Mussolini’s fascism, or its hypocritically macho perversion of
homosexuality.
Auditor
Let’s please look at statement number nine, “Italian Futurism lacked
something of the collectivist optimism of its Russian counterpart,
and, in retrospect, might ought have been taken with a grain of salt.”
Master of Ceremonies
57
Rather, we have given this brief time slot over to our subject, Alfred
Jarry, allowing him to expound on the down-sides of time travel… it’s
also a moment that allows you, the audience, our guests tonight, a
hint of the inner-workings of theater itself. As you know, this is a
new play, being produced for the first time ever, and the director is
someone who has established impressive credentials working with
playwrights on new works (projection of director’s website or just CV). The process
is an intense collaboration, a negotiation on how best to free the
words from the page and give them a life in the actions of the stage.
Think of the play as the playwright’s baby, delightful and totally
subject to the writer’s wishes and commands, and capable of speaking
the wonderful pidgin or secret language the two of them have created
together. Then think of the director as the person who has to change
the diapers, teach the baby to walk and speak a real language, potty
train it, and keep it from throwing its food at you. Sometimes there
are fights over who has the baby’s best interests at heart, over
whether or not the baby is being spoiled or needs its nails clipped.
Sometimes the actors have to huddle together and sob silently while
the playwright and director call each other names and wish that the
other one wasn’t constantly thinking up ways to just totally fucking
ruin the baby... just make the baby babble on and on like an idiot
about nothing important, or dress the baby up like some sort of little
tramp, and then they throw dishes and slam doors and drive off too
fast and screammy.
So now’s a moment when the playwright and director had to come to a
compromise, a carefully worded compromise… (pulls out a piece of paper and reads)
… You, the audience, have a choice in this next scene. You may either
keep your eyes open and see the beautiful lyric staging the director
58
has painstakingly conceived, or you may close your eyes and simply
listen to the pure and simple words as they were intended to be heard.
You decide. It won’t hurt anyone’s feelings; just don’t vacillate.
Eyes open or eyes closed. It doesn’t mean you love the playwright or
the director more. But you have to decide and live with your decision.
Alfred Jarry, ladies and gentlemen, on the topic of time travel!
Jarry
(once again the dying man on the bed, stronger, maybe a day or two before the end, but in
gruesome, muscular poses) The problem with the time machine, with its
purpose of remaining immobile in a given point of time, is that, in
that moment, you are sometimes immobile for far longer than is
necessary or healthful or bearable; there is a terrifying paralysis as
you realize you will never see this lover again and this last moment,
the one you are immobile in, is the most painful and untrue moment you
have ever experienced together, the only one with absolutely no love
in it; the second when it becomes clear that your younger sister,
Charlotte, without encouragement or any good reason, has dedicated
herself to taking care of you, minimizing your suffering as much as
possible and suddenly she is old and broken by her selflessness and
you continue to die, not so undeservedly as she; the opening of the
door to find the process server with papers demanding money you do not
and never will have in payment for your only independence, a bicycle,
and the horror of knowing you will spend the rest of your life hiding
somehow, running away from; the moment you realize that not one of
your dreams can possibly come true; the moment an owl you have
59
befriended and fed, dies as you stroke its fringed wings, this is the
problem we have yet to solve with the time machine, these moments that
last forever, and the horror of our purpose is then, that the memory
we seek to achieve is simply a moment in time that we can never escape
and must suffer through always… that it is our weapon to defeat our
enemies bespeaks a fatal flaw, our own sadness… our reluctance to
leave any moment behind…
Auditor
Initial this, or not, number ten, “I am moved by the extent to which
Alfred Jarry suffers in service to my freedom, my humanness in the
face of change, and I am sad.”
Master of Ceremonies
Shhhh, he’s asleep. We all know Alfred wouldn’t talk like this, nor
could he be a symbolist/proto-dadaist if he didn’t drink too much and
huff a bit too much ether. He’s a sweet boy and he’s dying, and has
been dying for a long time from undiagnosed tubercular meningitis; he
needs his rest. We should sing a song. No, his sister, Charlotte,
who takes care of him when anyone does, should sing it, we should
encourage her.
Charlotte
(In the Sickbay)
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Still awake as day is breaking
My spirit's broken too
Fed on leeks, by now too weak
To speak when spoken to
Nannies, fussing with flannels
Feeding the spaniel celery
These grey sickbay days
Slowly the sacred core decays
Above the bed the Virgin's head
Perspective all askew
On the rail a grail of pale
Medicinal gruel
Nurses, whispering verses
Click shut their purses and depart
These grey sickbay days
Slowly the sacred core decays
Anthony Moore and Peter Blegvad, from Desperate Straights
(while a group of patients from the Salpetriere – hysterics - enter and line-up. The two doctors
enter, labcoats and respectability, setting up a camera, positioning the bodies into various
grotesque positions and masks, they talk as they manipulate the patients with various pointers
and props)
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Nordau
(making fun of Alfred’s biking style, the nostalgia of the last bit, wiping the old tear from the
eye…) We too have found a way to travel through time, but without
getting stuck in sad moments or caring what the fuck people think
they’re feeling. Whenever it is, we’re always coming from the future.
My name is Max Nordau, and, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, I developed a set of theories that each and every one of you
has internalized: that artists are madmen, degenerates, prone to
perversions and neurasthenias because they physiologically can’t adapt
to the rhythms and stimuli of modern life, their fragile psyches
prevent them from manning up to achieve, they’re effeminized like a
Shakespeare character in love, their germ-plasm is corrupt. At best,
they should be sterilized.
Charcot
This reaction to the modern world is not at all unusual in the weaker,
the more feminine, sensitive, whatever, among us. They are constantly
shocked by the complexity of their surroundings, and have no control
over the “double,” the primal, somnambulistic state that reduces them
to machines, robots…
Nordau
In the case of artists, their creations reflect their inability to
process the complexities of modern life and focus instead on the
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failure of their senses – the impressionist, the pointillist, the
symbolist, the modernist shows us only his degenerative nervous tics,
his terrified and impotent reaction to modern life… he is caught up in
it, rather than mastering it…
Jesse Helms
(In a puff of smoke, some equivalent?) Hello, gentlemen, I’m Senator Jesse Helms
of North Carolina and its 1989, and that little prick Alfred Jarry
obviously has time travelled to here and now and has convinced
everybody that artists know what art is and that the world should
support them in their creativity. Well, I think that’s poop from a
cow’s ass and stupid as my retard cousin Timothy, all of a sudden
we’ve got Jesus in piss and flags on the floor and lesbians in the
bathtub and disturbingly well hung gay men just standing around all
normal and whatnot and people are being told that artists express the
range of humanness, which is just like some goddamn sideshow, where we
look at Siamese twins and wonder how they shit and fuck…
Nordau
Right, and we can’t let those people decide things, they’re
degenerates!
Charcot
They’re hysterics and lesbians and worse…!
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Helms
Don’t worry boys, I think we’ve pretty much kicked artists to the
ground, we’ve cut off their funding and their food stamps and hung em
out to dry in the winds of the free market... We’ve taken artists and
gotten them to wanna be like us, have nice things, be pleasing, forget
what they came here for, poor stupid bastards, poor stupid buggerass,
we can even manipulate Jarry’s own creations into the message we want,
it’s easy… take a looksee at this crap…
(enter the three free men and the corporal, marching in disarray)
Three Free Men
We are the free men, and this is our corporal – three cheers for
freedom, rah, rah, rah! We are free – let’s not forget, it’s our duty
to be free.
(marching, and serious about what they’re saying) Hey! Not so fast, or we might
arrive on time. Freedom means never arriving on time – never, never! –
for our freedom drills. Let’s disobey together… No!, not together:
one, two, three! the first will disobey on the count of one, the
second on two, the third on three. That makes all the difference.
Let’s each march out of step with the other two, however exhausting it
may be to keep it up. Let’s disobey individually – here comes the
corporal of the free men!
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Helms
And this is the best part gentlemen, we can shake-a-shit with his own
words. Once he publishes something, hell once he just writes
something, he produces a commodity we can own and position into
anything we want, we just take his own concept, that art is chosen and
manipulated out of reality, and turn it against him…
Jarry
(awakening from his nightmare sleep, fighting, screaming) No, you can not fuck with
my work, my ideas, the truth, you don’t know what they’re saying…
means. You don’t know what I mean!
Helms
Did you write this? We so fucking know what you mean.
Jarry
(as if this is a rational argument he’s having) Yes, but you’re not showing what it
means…
Helms
We’re never going to let anyone else know what you want it to mean.
We’re gonna manipa-late it into whatever we want… Remember when
Gourmont removed you from the editorship of your own magazine,
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L’Ymagier, essentially stealing your entire inheritance? Do you
remember when Vallette stopped publishing you in the Mercure de Paris,
ending your claim to literary relevancy and your income? That was us
robot boy, and now we control everything you ever produced, and it
means whatever we want it to mean. The bourgeois greengrocers your
Ubu was supposed to destroy now control everyfuckinthing! Take a
listen to your boys now boy and see if you think they’re your boys…
context, asserole. Con-fucking-text!
Corporal
Fall in! (they fall out) You, Free Man number three, you get two day’s
detention for being in line with number two. The training manual lays
down quite clearly that you must be free! – Individual drills in
disobedience … Blind and unwavering indiscipline at all times
constitutes the real strength of all Free Men – Slope… arms!
Three Free Men
Let’s talk in the ranks. – let’s disobey – the first on the count of
one, the second on the count of two, the third on the count of three.
– One, two, three!
Helms
Lookee that boy, they’re all crazy disobedient and individual-like,
and that’s your point, isn’t it? That there’s just nothing to that
kind of stupid grab-a-dick independence, right? That people should
save up their acting out for some kind of big dookie revolution or
66
other? Well, we got the revolution (Nordau: “I got your revolution right here.”),
its called product placement… Lookee this…
Corporal
As you were! Number one, you should have grounded arms; number two,
surrendered your weapon; number three thrown your rifle six paces
behind you and then tried to strike a libertarian attitude. Fall out!
One, two, one two.!
First Free Man
Where are you off to, comrade? Hey, I suspect you’re obeying.
Actor Playing Docent
(rushing onstage with paper towel in collar, straight from make-up) Oh my god, I was
listening to this on the squawk box in the green room, and I had to
rush in here – you people need some decent docenting desperately!
This is a scene from Jarry’s last Ubu play, Ubu Enchained, in which
Pere Ubu, tired of the tyrant’s life, forces people to make him their
slave, arguing that all slaves are free men, and all free men are
slaves. He points out the absurd lengths that free men go to to be
different from everyone by being so much the same as each other. He
sets much of the action around military life because he himself was
conscripted into the army where he spent his time being the worst
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soldier possible, not by disobeying, but by obeying too much, being
insanely obedient and turning obedience into the most aggressive form
of sedition…
Third Free Man
So that’s why we keep meeting by accident every morning - so that we
can all disobey together as regular as clockwork.
Actor Playing Docent
Jarry actually recognized, long before social theorists caught up with
him, the concept of white privilege, where petty disobediences take
the place of political crime, where pretend risk replaces activism,
where absolute solipsism replaces common cause… People who are so
concerned with their own freedoms they don’t give a shit if other
people, the “others” have enough to eat, or health care, or mental
health services…
First Free Man
I heart disobedience!
Second Free Man
Me too!! And I heart things, things that we can buy!
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First Free Man
(hands on hips) I’m glad we’re free, and I’m even gladder that not
everyone is!
Second and Third Free Men
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are the free men!
Jarry
NOOOO… you are fucking killing me with this shit, I’m riffing on the
carnivalesque by showing how people allow themselves to be subjugated
into what is essentially slavery by believing the lies about their
freedom… their freedom doesn’t exist!!
Actor Playing Docent
That’s right Alfred! Commodities are the first form of pollution! (exits)
Master of Ceremonies
(grabbing hold of the actor playing docent) Hold on there you fiery firebrand!
You’ve really got this Alfred Jarry fever, haven’t you?
Actor Playing Docent
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Not really, I’m just really into my character, a docent, who helps
people make sense of incoherent patterns. I followed a docent for two
weeks to prepare for this, and they were always interrupting people
and telling them what was really going on. I think this play is really
about the docent, and should have a lot more docent parts in it. I
mean, how else is the audience going to know what’s what. I think
everybody in the audience should have their own docent, for
everything, 24 hours a day.
Auditor
Oh, we’ve got to stop here, and ask what turns into a fundamental
question, statement eleven, “Being free is a feeling enhanced by
having nice things and looking good, and being just a little bit
crazy, but never crazy in way that police will have to taze you, or
you infringe on the rights of others, unless they’re “those” people,
and you know what I’m talking about here, those people who really
don’t deserve all the rights we’ve given them.” Initial away! And now,
back to high drama!
Jarry
Dick dick goose you fartashits! That’s not what that is at all! Ubu is
supposed to enter and yell Hurrah for the Shittenarmy! And then we see
the fakefuckfree men try to force him to obey because he is so
obviously the FREE MAN! because he doesn’t care about any of that
commercialized shit, shittr.
Charcot
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Alfred, you’ve made it clear that nothing matters more than our own
personal individuality, good boy, don’t tread on us, right? Freedom is
so easy and comfortable, and good looking, boy. (to the audience) Hell, you
poor people are free to work against your self-interests and support
the self-serving agendas of the rich every minute of every day!
Helms
Those boys are real patriots, wanting to be free and all, free to do
just any old thing.
Nordau
Jarry needs help… he doesn’t even comprehend the universal truths he’s
exploring, like most degenerate artists, he misses the actual patterns
present in reality (connects cables from a field telephone to Alfred’s balls, cranks) and
substitutes his own misunderstandings for truth. Fortunately, we’ve
harnessed the forces of nature to the greater good. This machine will
help him recognize connections and cause and effect. The heart of the
power dynamic.
Helms
Hell, I hope this machine doesn’t fall in love with him! (they make
scaredy faces and laugh)
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Jarry
(screams) This is my dream… it’s the rising of the moon… I’m making fun
of you… what you all are missing, yet millions of readers will know,
is the level of critique, the level of anger, the insurrection
possible in daily life, this is what Army life was like for me… and I
fought and won with every ounce of precocious imbecility I could
muster!
(acts out each)
Excuse me Monsieur, my uniform does not fit for I am a dwarf.
Excuse me Monsieur, I have urinated on both my pants and your shoes.
Excuse me Monsieur, I did not mean to shoot the First Drummer.
Excuse me Monsieur, I have finished cleaning the toilets, shall I
bring your dinner now?
Excuse me Monsieur, I have just drunk a bottle of acid. (leaps forward)
(Link Wray: Rumble)
So I suppose you gentlemen think you’re tough? How about my boys meet
your boys tonight, in the vacant lot behind the candy store, and we
dance and fight with knives and rumble. Yeah, you heard me, we
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challenge you to a rumble, all out, once and for all, no cops, no
rules, and whoever lives, wins.
Jesse Helms
(taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves) I’ll take you right here you
slickum’d-up
prick, ain’t no reason to wait, you don’t got nothing but a gang of
cartoon characters anyway…
Charcot
(holding Jesse back) Hold on Jesse, this is our chance…
Jarry
What a coop full of chickens!
Helms
Who you callin’ chicken? Let me at him, I’ll take his whole bunch on
alone! I ain’t afraid to get close in! I ain’t afraid to slug it out!
I ain’t afraid to use plain skin! It’ll take two minutes and you’ll
be like a fish after skinnin’
Nordau
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Cut the shit Jesse! And stop talking about skin! We need reporters,
people there to tell the story we want told, the true story of how we
took on chaos and kicked it’s ass… we have to have control of the
situation. We have to have control!
Jarry
I say we rumble tonight at midnight, be there, good boys, or be
square.
Helms
(again, like a wrestler, running the corners, working the crowd) YES! “Say to the
nations far and wide: ‘Get ready for war! Call out your best warriors!
Let all your fighting men advance for the attack! Beat your plowshares
into swords and your pruning hooks into spears. Train even your
weaklings to be warriors. Come quickly, all you nations everywhere!
Gather together in the valley.’ And now, O Lord, call out your
warriors! ‘Let the nations be called to arms. Let them march to the
valley of Jehoshaphat. There I, the Lord, will sit to pronounce
judgement on them all. Now, let the sickle do its work, for the
harvest is ripe. Come, tread the winepress because it is full. The
storage vats are overflowing with the wickedness of these people.’”
Master of Ceremonies
Meanwhile, back at the Alfred Jarry Museum, right about now…
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Docent
Last call for the museum’s last show of the night, Children’s Letters
to Alfred Jarry! Children’s Letters! From Children! It’s touching,
it’s magical, it’s truths from the mouths of babes to our Hero! They
say the funniest things! This is our last show of the night.
Master of Ceremonies
(Jarry reenters, carrying the table and chair from the Theatre de L’Oeuvre opening, humble,
focused) This is the person we want you to get to know tonight, so set
aside your personal feelings and preferences, because he’s time
travelling, he supports creativity and sadness, and is unbound by
gender binaries, is handsome and loving in an eccentric manner, has
friends among the starving classes, and is whip-smart, Alfred Jarry
ladies and gentlemen, where even though he’s preparing for a rumble,
he still takes time to answer letters sent to him from children, many
of them hospitalized for a variety of reasons. He’s like a sincere
Jerry Lewis wearing his own jewelry as the clown in a concentration
camp, making children laugh, right before they’re gassed…
Docent
This museum has no physical exhibits. It is a dialogue. (Jesse Helms
offstage: “Nooooooo! That just isn’t right, goddammit, that’s not the way things are done…”)
Mostly, we want to introduce children to the idea that chaos has
meaning and that order, control, destroys vast swaths of humanness,
and that the arts are a-okay…
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Helms
(offstage) They are not a-okay, art is full of monster pedophiles and
free –thinker monster hippy drug addicts who want to make fun of
Jesus, and children who shouldn’t be allowed to dance or do forensics,
Goddam that’s just disgusting what with their stupid emoting and and
hand gesturing and all…
(Sign: Children’s Letters to Alfred Jarry!)
(children’s voices read the letters)
Child
Dear Alfred Jarry,
Is all your crazy robot Ubu acting an act? Have you really turned into
a character and left being human? If I wanted to look like you, would
I be chubby or skinny? Do you have a regimen and why? Can you afford
bread, or do you have to bake it yourself?
Signed,
Wonderingly
Jarry
Dear Wonderingly,
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Yes and no. I no longer have control over how I present myself. I
have not looked at myself in years. My only regimen is bicycling
and fishing. I ride to Paris, 20 miles everyday, each way, drunk
or sober. I fish to eat. I drink whatever there is, to maintain
equilibrium.
Thank you for asking,
Alfred Jarry
Child
Dear Alfred Jarry,
What is it like to be gay in 1894? Does it suck when you’re a kid
like it does now? Does it keep on sucking if you live in a small town?
Can you cook anything that doesn’t have processed cheese in or on it?
Should I move to Atlanta or Paris? Is it okay to learn to sew if
you’re a boy?
Signed, Curious
Jarry
Dear Curious,
I wouldn’t really know because when it’s 1894 (and all you tell
me, when does this stop?), you can’t be gay. If you are gay they
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put you in jail or, extra judiciously, find you and beat you, cut
off your dick, laugh at you while you bleed to death.
Find safe places and safe people, find someplace to go and there
are places to go where it has to suck less, but our society sets
up a power dynamic that profits heterosexuality. Learn to sew.
Cook. Care for people. Be a human being. Good luck.
Sincerely, Alfred Jarry
Child
Dear Alfred Jarry,
Why can’t I understand anything you write except the word, shittr?
Signed, Doesn’t Understand
Jarry
Dear Doesn’t Understand.
Sometimes we don’t really listen to things until we hear
something outside of the ordinary. Sometimes we don’t pay
attention until there’s an anomaly.
Sometimes that means, you are acting stupidly. It’s all your
fault.
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Listen better. Destroy the self. Encourage others. Move. Shake.
Imagine. Imagine more. Destroy suffering.
Sorry for the inconvenience,
Alfred Jarry
Child
Dear Alfred Jarry,
Have you ever had a close, intimate relationship with a woman, other
than your mother and sister?
Signed, A Woman Who Cares
Rachilde
Oh my god, this is a funny story… so, it’s the mid-1890’s and Alfred
has pretty much just showed up in Paris and he’s just a baby, but my
god he can write like he’s lifting weights and everybody’s noticing
him and some of us are jealous and some of us want a piece of it, and
some of us just downright want to control it, but he’s got this whole
otherworldly vibe, like he’s some sort of monkish nance and, honeys,
he really just doesn’t have anything: his clothes are frayed and he
paints on ties and wears women’s shoes, and has a cape and he’s only 5
feet tall, but he’s a little hunk, riding his bike all over and he’s
got this unbelievable apartment that’s only half tall because the
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rentier tried to get two floors out of every one in his building, and
Alfred’s got live owls in there that come and go, and church statues
and velvet and candles, I mean, he’s got it going and on top of that
he just lies on the floor and writes, drunk out of his mind, all day
and night long…
Tinan
Madame Rachilde, the wife of Vallette, the publisher of the Mercure,
who had taken an immense liking to Jarry’s writings, both of them had,
but she, being somehow threatened, and me being a young, didn’t know
he was dying, novelist, dying also to be published and it was looking
so easy for Jarry, Rachilde approached me with the idea of an innocent
prank. We would all gather at the Mercure salons on Tuesday evenings,
and one of the regulars was the paramour of Gourmont, and established
writer and co-editor with Jarry of the magazine, L’Ymagier, funded by
Jarry’s inheritance and dedicated to the history of the graphic arts,
from medieval block prints to contemporary works, like Rousseau’s
etching of his monumental “War.”
Rachilde
Jesus, this is taking forever, Gourmont’s mistress, who bankrolled
him, was Berthe de Courriere, we called her the Old Lady, or Bigfoot.
She was this monumental nymphomaniac who slathered herself in
petroleum jelly to fend off the aging process, and had a penchant for
screwing wicked priests. Well, we all thought Jarry was going too far
too fast, and just wasn’t paying dues or reverence where it was due,
and obviously was as queer as, you know, queer is, and so we started
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telling Berthe how he swooned when she would sing and how he seemed
like he was being seduced by faggotry and needed a woman to set him
straight, and someone to sew his buttons on and I may have said he had
a cast of a penis in his room that was ten inches tall and I asked him
if it was a life-cast and he said no, it was a re-duc-tion, and don’t
you know it, within a week she’s writing him a letter…
Tinan
Let me, I wrote down what I heard of it: (Berthe’s voice?)
Come, there is none to equal me. I know the despair of Orpheus and the anguish of his
plaints. The vulture will cease to devour Prometheus and Pygmalion will no longer
animate a futile shade.
Come, I shall give you time and eternity, I know the secret of beyond, you will not
uselessly implore the deaf gods, and your dreams will not shatter on the limits of the
possible.
Come and you will prevail; come, that I might carry you off to limitless space. I have won
over all the Chimeras, I shall give you an unending dream…
Come, you will be the Conquerer, if you can but understand, and dare.
Rachilde
So then, she shows up at his apartment, twice his age and a foot
taller, glistening with petroleum jelly…
Berthe
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(while Alfred just looks at her with bugged out eyes, unbelieving)I’ve changed my dress
in your presence and you haven’t even looked at me. I have dresses
slit at the side so that they reveal a glimpse of my yellow drawers
underneath, and only one fastener need be undone and the whole dress
slips off. And I’ve had them specially made for adultery. I never wash
except with Vaseline.
Jarry
But if I may be indiscreet, how about Gourmont?
Berthe
I am naturally chaste, and its been so long since that’s happened to
me that it is exactly as if I were a virgin… o, I beg you, let us cast
a veil… they say that in the brothels, some of the women have obliging
little tricks that are quite extraordinary… would you like me to put
my false teeth in a glass of water so as the extend to my whole palate
the softness of my lips?
Tinan
Needless to say, he was furious, and he committed the sin of writers
wronged, he wrote about it. Berthe was furious, Gourmont was furious,
Gourmont broke with Jarry and Vallette, Vallete soon thereafter broke
with Jarry, and Rachilde never accepted any blame for setting it up.
Jarry didn’t even know it, but his entire career, at least the one he
could have while he was alive, was ruined. He lost his publishers, his
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position, his reputation, and had to scramble the rest of his life.
He’s lucky to have died as young as he did.
Rachilde
He had no discretion and little ability to be civil. My husband and I
continued to be friends with him until his death, we just never
supported his art, his writing again. Too disorderly, too obscure, too
much like his life, chaotic and sad.
Auditor
Statement twelve is a simple one, “Women, can’t live with them, can’t
kill them.” Help science, initial now! Remember, this is just to
indicate you have heard the words referenced within the statement, or,
you haven’t, and you’re just being entertained. Whatever happens,
remember, this statement has nothing to do with internalized
oppression, gender politics, or a structural misogyny!
Master of Ceremonies
Let’s grab an actor and get a glimpse of the magical backstage world
of this crazy theatrum mundi! Hey you! (Rachilde Actor comes over, with a towel
and a martini) That was quite a scene, all that intrigue and sexual
exploit and such-a-not! And you, look at you, ruining Jarry’s life
because of your own petty insecurities and gender biases, and still,
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always, pretending to be his friend… well, enough of that, who are you
wearing tonight?
Rachilde Actor
It’s stock. For some reason theaters always have lots of enormous
dresses for the men to wear.
Master of Ceremonies
Would you mind spinning around, so we can get a quick look at that
cute little outfit you have on?
Rachilde Actor
Of course, Master of Ceremonies, why don’t you take a picture, it’ll
last longer.
Master of Ceremonies
Scoot along, little honey. Meanwhile, back in the life of Alfred
Jarry, where its almost time for the Rumble, we find him, at the very
beginning of the twentieth century, one angry little fuck, taken to
carrying around pistols and a carbine over his shoulder, followed by a
whole patrol of
Jarry – wanna – bes, like Picasshole and a toothless man named Cervil.
He shoots frequently, and without thought to consequence. Ladies and
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gentlemen, the part of the show where we present a somewhat gratuitous
pastiche of Jarry’s inappropriate pistol shooting!
Chapter One!
Jarry
And now we’re going to ki-kill little Bercail.
Bercail
Just say that again out loud.
Jarry
(in a falsetto) And now we’re going to ki-kill little Bercail. (Jarry pulls out a
large pistol, levels it at Bercail, who gets up on a chair and stands with his arms folded behind
his back like Napoleon, everyone applauds)
(Jarry gets on a chair, stretches out his arm with the pistol, toward Bercail, someone yells “put
the light out, put the light out! Someone does, blackout, pistol shot, scream of pain, lights up,
scientist in audience holding eye runs back stage, lots of blood)
Bercail
I pooped myself. J’ai fait caca moi-meme!
Master of Ceremonies
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Chapter Two!
Passerbye
May I have a light, brother?
(Jarry shoots in the direction of the cigarette)
Jarry
Voila!
(shoots many shots from his pistol)
I keep a hundred hundred pound barrels of gunpowder, so I can shoot
all night!
Passerbye
Excuse me, monsieur, which way is the Seine, the river by which
Rousseau paints and you fish your only food?
(Jarry points and shoots)
Master of Ceremonies
Chapter Three!
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Woman Next Door
Madame Rachilde, your guest will surely kill one of my children with
his target practice…
Jarry (like Groucho)
If that evil hour ever arrives Madame, we will be happy to make some
others with you.
Master of Ceremonies
(really big, excited, the crescendo has been building… ) Why do you shoot at people,
Alfred!?
Jarry
Wait, are you talking to me the way you’d talk to a performer, or a
lunatic?
Master of Ceremonies
No time! It’s a Rumble!!
(midnight behind the candy store, the Phynancial Phyve and Charcot, Nordau, Jesse Helms,
Rachilde, Berthe, Roger Shattuck, Picasso, Hebert, Marinetti, a sort of overwhelming force
against the PhPh….they all come to the edges of the light, like cockroaches, some come from or
stand in the audience, scientists throw down their clipboards and labcoats)
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The Ventures: Apache
Master of Ceremonies
(finally getting to do the real announcing shit) Ready? (Helms and Jarry nod and square off)
Ready? Shake hands.
Jarry
Look, I don’t go for that pretend crap you all go for in your
totalitarian regime. Every one of you hates every one of us, and we
hate you right back. I don’t drink with nobody I hate, and I don’t
shake hands with nobody I hate. Let’s get at it. (waves the shitter stick and
dances around Helms)
(everybody pairs off, or more, shitter hooks and gleaming gold pens and combs and
individual’s chosen tools… )
Helms
Drop ‘em boyos! (all the forces of order drop their tools/weapons and stand up straight.
The Phynancial Phyves step back and look, slightly bewildered)
Jarry
What, are you afraid, pretty boy? (puffs up and approaches Helms)
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Helms
Slope… Arms! (each one of the forces of order pull out a gun, point it at someone in the
Phynancial Phyve, and shoot them dead, explosively, like a Peckinpah shootout. The Phyves
drop like dead weights to the ground. There is smoke. Nobody talks. Helms, et al. leave stage,
dropping playing cards, spades, on the dead bodies. The Phyves remain through the
rest. )That’s the way we do it. U-Huh.
Auditor
This last is two statements. You are to initial the statement you find
most true.
Statement A: Alfred Jarry deserves to be defeated (and I recognize all
that the concept of defeated means) because his works, conflated with
his life, are contrary to the values of the vast majority of
Americans. While I have sympathy for him as a person, I cannot abide
his ideas influencing young people or our public debates and feel that
the less attention given them the better, meaning this entire
production has been misguided, its subject, and the vulgarity of its
concepts are degrading to our commonly held principals.
Statement B: I am glad I had this experience and the opportunity to
learn something about ideas I didn’t already have. I hope that
Alfred’s battle for the acceptance of chaos and the close examination
of meaning in daily life continues, and that people, myself included,
continue to explore the question, “Is there any other way to live?”
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Linda Klieger Stillman
My name is Linda Klieger Stillman, I am a college professor. I teach
French. I write books. I write about Alfred Jarry. This is something I
said in 1983 :
The dominant “psychological disposition” of modern Western
culture… is narcissism. Jarry’s self-theatricalization into a
multiplicity of doubles tragically renders material a madness
which marks the particular pathology of the modern era. Instead
of sublimating (or repressing) conflicts in a socially acceptable
manner, Jarry’s characters typically “act out” their psychic
battles.
The relationship between the Self and the Other is modified by
structures of alienation… In other words, Jarry’s aesthetic, his
insistent use of heraldry, code-words, neologisms, musical and
mathematical signs, and cryptic intertextual references all mark
his writing as participating in Madness and the Imaginary.
Ubu
Shittr.
Disembodied Voice
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Here’s a song by Alfred Jarry. It’s funny that it’s set on the same
street as the offices of the Mercure de France, isn’t it? That’s so
true, you don’t even have to initial it.
Sing along with us, just follow the bouncing ball:
The Song of the Disembraining
(the audience should be singing along from their programs)
I’d worked as a cabinet maker for more than one decade.
Rue du Champ de Mars, (All Saints), was my address.
My wife worked as well; millinery was her trade.
And everything we had was always of the best.
When Sunday came around and we saw it wasn’t raining
We used to doll up like mad and make ourselves look fine,
And then we’d all go out to watch the disembraining
Rue de l’Echaude, to have a lovely time.
Look, look at the machine revolving,
Look, look at the brain flying,
Look, look at the rentiers trembling!
Hurrah, arse-horns, long live Pere Ubu!
Our two little brats, smeared all over with jam,
Trustfully brandishing dolls made out of papier mache,
Installed themselves with us up on the top of the tram,
And we merrily lurched along towards the Echaude.
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We rushed headlong en masse as near as we could to the fence—
As long as we got th the front, kicks didn’t matter two hoots,
I climbed on a heap of stones – I’ve got plenty of sense;
I didn’t want the blood to dirty my beautiful boots.
Look, look at the machine revolving,
Look, look at the brain flying,
Look, look at the rentiers trembling!
Hurrah, arse-horns, long live Pere Ubu!
Soon, we were white with brain, my loving wife and I.
The brats were eating it up, and we were merry as hell
At the sight of the Palotin waving his blade sky-high
And the knives all different sizes, and all the wounds as well.
Suddenly what do I see in the corner near the machine
But the mug of a chap I know; an ugly customer, too –
Old cock, says I to him, you may be looking green,
But you used to pinch my things; I shan’t be sorry for you.
Look, look at the machine revolving,
Look, look at the brain flying,
Look, look at the rentiers trembling!
Hurrah, arse-horns, long live Pere Ubu!
All of a sudden I feel my wife give me a shove
You silly mug, says she; this isn’t the time to slack –
Chuck a heap of dung in the fellow’s face, my love
--Now’s your chance because the Palotin’s turned his back.
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This really magnificent reasoning leaves my much impressed,
So I summon up all my courage and balance myself on tiptoes,
And I sling a gigantic turdr at the rentier’s padded chest
--Which eventually flattens itself on the bloody Palotin’s nose.
Look, look at the machine revolving,
Look, look at the brain flying,
Look, look at the rentiers trembling!
Hurrah, arse-horns, long live Pere Ubu!
In less than no time at all I find that I’ve changed my role,
I’m pitchforked over the fence by the furiously angry crowd,
And I’m rushed along arse-over-tip into the big black hole
Whence no one ever comes back – unless they’re wrapped up in a shroud
And that’s what happens to people who go for their Sunday walk
To the Rue d’Echaude to watch them disembrain,
And work the pig-pinching machine, or even the tomahawk
--When you set out you’re alive, and when you come back you’re slain.
Look, look at the machine revolving,
Look, look at the brain flying,
Look, look at the rentiers trembling!
Hurrah, arse-horns, long live Pere Ubu!
Auditor
Everyone, attention please, please remember, you’ll need to turn in your Audience Contract Sheet before you can leave the theater.
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Master of Ceremonies
And remember, don’t shit a shittr!! No, wait, you can’t shit a shittr, that’s it!!
Audience Interactive Sheet
Practice Statement
Susan, a girl, says that Artaud, a foreigner, went on a trip for us and somebody else went on a trip for him and we shouldn’t talk about his colon. __________
Statement One
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Alfred Jarry fell asleep in school to disobey, and subsequently ruineda lot of good things, for all of us. ___________
Statement Two A
Alfred Jarry made people mad by putting bad words in his plays and on-stage. ________
Statement Two B
Alfred Jarry angered people in his audience by defying what, especially in France, were long established theatrical conventions. ________ Statement Three
People who use big words, pedants, are okay if we agree with them, but Oscar Wilde was the bad kind. ________
Statement Four
I know who the Phynancial Phyve are. ________
Statement Five
Something wicked just happened. ________
Statement Six
What’s more important?
A a person’s behavior ________
or
B a toothpick ________
Statement Seven
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole. _______
Statement Eight
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What I’ve just seen isn’t very true, the people who weren’t writers that Alfred Jarry hung out with in working class dives and wharves andstables and bicycle shops must have thought that there was something terribly wrong with him, not that he was just fine, a good guy, not aneffete artist, a sincerely thoughtful and funny person. They weren’t in on his joke. They didn’t know culture was pulling a fast one on them. _______
Statement Nine
Italian Futurism lacked something of the collectivist optimism of its Russian counterpart, and, in retrospect, might ought have been taken with a grain of salt. ________
Statement Ten
I am moved by the extent to which Alfred Jarry suffers in service to my freedom, my humanness in the face of change, and I am sad. ________
Statement Eleven
Being free is a feeling enhanced by having nice things and looking good, and being just a little bit crazy, but never crazy in way that police will have to taze you, or you infringe on the rights of others,unless they’re those people, and you know what I’m talking about here,those people who really don’t deserve all the rights we’ve given them.________
Statement Twelve
Women, can’t live with them, can’t kill them. ________
Statement Thirteen
A Alfred Jarry deserves to be defeated (and I recognize all that the concept of defeated means) because his works, conflated with his life, are contrary to the values of the vast majority of Americans. While I have sympathy for him as a person, I cannot abide his ideas influencing young people or our public debates and feel that the less attention given them the better, meaning this entire production has
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been misguided, its subject, and the vulgarity of its concepts are degrading to our commonly held principals. ________
B I am glad I had this experience and the opportunity to learn something about ideas I didn’t already have. I hope that Alfred’s battle for the acceptance of chaos and the close examination of meaning in daily life continues, and that people, myself included, continue to explore the question, “Is there any other way to live? ________
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