Ubu for President is a play by Josh Costello, adapted from Alfred Jarry. It had its world premiere with the Shotgun Players in Berkeley, California the summer of 2008. The new draft is complete and available for production (perhaps during the 2016 election season?); please email joshcostello at gmail dot com to request a script.
Click here for reviews of the 2008 production. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "an engaging romp... outrageous, generally delightful, and very funny."
Click here for a dialogue sample -- the presidential debate.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Review Highlights
"An engaging romp" -Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle
"Wildly funny" -Pat Craig, Contra Costa Times
"outrageous, generally delightful, and very funny" -Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle
"Hysterical... Casi Maggio is a comic highlight as the bubbly teen princess... Sung Min Park is hilariously spaced out and touchy-feely as new character Ming... What they've done to the play is great — if anything, they should do more of it... The insistent energy of the show is infectious, and it's hard not to get swept up in it." -Sam Hurwitt, East Bay Express
"Hysterical... Casi Maggio is a comic highlight as the bubbly teen princess... Sung Min Park is hilariously spaced out and touchy-feely as new character Ming... What they've done to the play is great — if anything, they should do more of it... The insistent energy of the show is infectious, and it's hard not to get swept up in it." -Sam Hurwitt, East Bay Express
"The Ubus are delightfully vile... Director Patrick Dooley only barely contains the manic energy of his cast, which is as it should be... Costello's snappy script... with a cast this good and a play this funny, you may just bust your gut basket" -Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune
"a broad burlesque of contemporary popular culture" -Ken Bullock, Berkeley Daily Planet
"much high and low comedy, silly gags, outrageous word play, only-slightly-masked profanity, an election, and a sort of comedic free-for-all that somehow manages to make some nicely pointed commentary on the current scene." -Pat Craig, Contra Costa Times
"Josh Costello, who adapted the script from Alfred Jarry's proto-absurdist "Ubu Roi," and Shotgun Players Artistic Director Patrick Dooley say they've tried to avoid making the 112-year-old "Ubu" a satire on the election in progress. Current events won't cooperate. True, the real-life incumbent Ubu isn't running again, and Dave Garrett's clueless Pa Ubu and Sung Min Park's hilariously New Age-spacey Ming bear little relation to actual candidates named John McCain or Barack Obama. But Costello has inserted some telling parallels, including a comic perennial protest candidate. Then again, neither he nor Dooley could've predicted that the opening of Shotgun's annual free show in John Hinkel Park would coincide with Paris Hilton's entrance into the race. The party-hearty Princess Power campaign of the self-entitled Princess Buggerless (Casi Maggio) and her killer, pom-pom-wielding posse is a highlight of a ragtag and enjoyable show." -Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Last chance to see Ubu for President
The Shotgun Players production closes Sunday, September 14 at 4pm in John Hinkle Park in Berkeley. Go see it!
Monday, August 25, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
East Bay Express review
link
A Fuggen Good Run
A vote for Ubu may save your weekend.
By Sam Hurwitt
Alfred Jarry's absurd and offensive Ubu Roi set off riots when the play premiered in 1896, so naturally it was later latched onto by the dada and surrealist movements and has been revived frequently ever since. A scatological send-up of Macbeth in which a stupid, vicious and cowardly glutton rises to power through duplicitous schemes, it also naturally resonates in present-day America. Now playing for free weekend afternoons in John Hinkel Park in Berkeley, Shotgun Players' Ubu for President doesn't go for the obvious Bush-bashing, however — it just shows a worst-case scenario when any idiot can become president.
Shaped somewhat by actors' improvisations in rehearsal, Josh Costello's adaptation scraps most of the Macbeth parody in Ubu's sudden rise to power, replacing it with a lot of new campaign antics including a hysterical five-way debate. Rather than simply plotting to kill the king, the people push for democracy and King Wenceslas magnanimously decides to run for president and abdicate when he wins.
Democratic rabble-rouser Ming Jamal Joaquin Wounded Knee Goldstein is his only halfway serious competition until Ma Ubu goads Pa Ubu into getting off his ass to run for president. Soon daddy's demands of campaign-trail propriety spur the petulant Princess Buggerless to launch her own competing "princess power" campaign — which is all the funnier because the play premiered shortly after McCain's commercial equating Obama with Paris Hilton inspired Hilton to release her own parody campaign video.
Casi Maggio is a comic highlight as the bubbly teen princess, this Ubu's version of Prince Bougrelas, the avenging son of the slain king in Jarry's original play, and she's priceless as a ridiculously unlikely rebel leader. Sung Min Park is hilariously spaced out and touchy-feely as new character Ming, from his beginning as an earnest student activist to his increasingly way-out speeches as some kind of new age prophet. In fact, overall the show is funniest and most effective when it's least faithful to the original.
Whatever echoes of Macbeth are lost are made up for by Shakespeare quotes flying every which way. There are a lot of new scatological gags that are very true to the tone of the original, including changing Captain Bordure to MacNure so that he can be called "Manure" all the time. The setting is changed from Poland to the mythical land of Fugall and is full of empty campaign promises to the "Fuggen" people. There's a bit of audience participation, with the crowd invited to vote during intermission and someone drafted to play a lackey's role in the second act.
There's still a lot of Ubu Roi left in this version, and once Ubu comes to power things go to pot pretty much the way they do in the original play. Another thing retained is the deliberately misspelled but frequently exclaimed "merdre" of the original, sometimes translated as "shittr," is here a more euphonious "pshit!" While the garbled cussing was all very shocking in its day, now it and the groin-clutching oath "by my green candle" come off as perplexingly leaden shticks (or "pshticks") in an otherwise riotous show.
Part of the problem may be the delivery: both are exclaimed with gusto by Dave Garrett as Ubu but land with a thud. Garrett's Ubu is an appealingly hapless and lubberly lout, but for all Ubu's appalling greed and brutality, he's almost a straight man in this production. Not only is he buffeted around by forces he's too dim-witted to understand, which was always the case, but now he has to contend with personalities more outrageous than his.
So it's not his fault, and certainly not for lack of trying, that the old pshit just isn't quite as funny as the new, which is much better news than if the reverse were true. What they've done to the play is great — if anything, they should do more of it.
Carla Pantoja plays Ma Ubu as a Miami matron in a high pink Marge Simpson bouffant, and Gary Grossman is an amusingly unctuous King Wenceslas, who can't hide his pompousness behind his newfound populism. Megan Guzman as the queen is a cartoonish lush, but no less funny for her broadness. Ryan O'Donnell makes a sympathetic straight man as Captain MacNure, even when upstaged by his cock-and-balls sword hilt.
Valera Coble's costumes are appropriately garish and clownlike, nicely complemented by Jacquelyn Scott's simple set of bright circus stripes on fabric like the exterior of a big top. A lot of amusing songs are scattered throughout the play, all of them to the tune of well-known ditties like "Good King Wenceslas," "Oh! Susanna," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" with clever lyrics by Garrett and Costello.
Patrick Dooley's madcap staging is long on slapstick and silliness, with almost necessarily mixed results. When you throw that much stuff against the wall, only some of it's going to stick. The insistent energy of the show is infectious, and it's hard not to get swept up in it. Why fight it? If you don't vote for Ubu, he's just going to cheat and win anyway.
A Fuggen Good Run
A vote for Ubu may save your weekend.
By Sam Hurwitt
Alfred Jarry's absurd and offensive Ubu Roi set off riots when the play premiered in 1896, so naturally it was later latched onto by the dada and surrealist movements and has been revived frequently ever since. A scatological send-up of Macbeth in which a stupid, vicious and cowardly glutton rises to power through duplicitous schemes, it also naturally resonates in present-day America. Now playing for free weekend afternoons in John Hinkel Park in Berkeley, Shotgun Players' Ubu for President doesn't go for the obvious Bush-bashing, however — it just shows a worst-case scenario when any idiot can become president.
Shaped somewhat by actors' improvisations in rehearsal, Josh Costello's adaptation scraps most of the Macbeth parody in Ubu's sudden rise to power, replacing it with a lot of new campaign antics including a hysterical five-way debate. Rather than simply plotting to kill the king, the people push for democracy and King Wenceslas magnanimously decides to run for president and abdicate when he wins.
Democratic rabble-rouser Ming Jamal Joaquin Wounded Knee Goldstein is his only halfway serious competition until Ma Ubu goads Pa Ubu into getting off his ass to run for president. Soon daddy's demands of campaign-trail propriety spur the petulant Princess Buggerless to launch her own competing "princess power" campaign — which is all the funnier because the play premiered shortly after McCain's commercial equating Obama with Paris Hilton inspired Hilton to release her own parody campaign video.
Casi Maggio is a comic highlight as the bubbly teen princess, this Ubu's version of Prince Bougrelas, the avenging son of the slain king in Jarry's original play, and she's priceless as a ridiculously unlikely rebel leader. Sung Min Park is hilariously spaced out and touchy-feely as new character Ming, from his beginning as an earnest student activist to his increasingly way-out speeches as some kind of new age prophet. In fact, overall the show is funniest and most effective when it's least faithful to the original.
Whatever echoes of Macbeth are lost are made up for by Shakespeare quotes flying every which way. There are a lot of new scatological gags that are very true to the tone of the original, including changing Captain Bordure to MacNure so that he can be called "Manure" all the time. The setting is changed from Poland to the mythical land of Fugall and is full of empty campaign promises to the "Fuggen" people. There's a bit of audience participation, with the crowd invited to vote during intermission and someone drafted to play a lackey's role in the second act.
There's still a lot of Ubu Roi left in this version, and once Ubu comes to power things go to pot pretty much the way they do in the original play. Another thing retained is the deliberately misspelled but frequently exclaimed "merdre" of the original, sometimes translated as "shittr," is here a more euphonious "pshit!" While the garbled cussing was all very shocking in its day, now it and the groin-clutching oath "by my green candle" come off as perplexingly leaden shticks (or "pshticks") in an otherwise riotous show.
Part of the problem may be the delivery: both are exclaimed with gusto by Dave Garrett as Ubu but land with a thud. Garrett's Ubu is an appealingly hapless and lubberly lout, but for all Ubu's appalling greed and brutality, he's almost a straight man in this production. Not only is he buffeted around by forces he's too dim-witted to understand, which was always the case, but now he has to contend with personalities more outrageous than his.
So it's not his fault, and certainly not for lack of trying, that the old pshit just isn't quite as funny as the new, which is much better news than if the reverse were true. What they've done to the play is great — if anything, they should do more of it.
Carla Pantoja plays Ma Ubu as a Miami matron in a high pink Marge Simpson bouffant, and Gary Grossman is an amusingly unctuous King Wenceslas, who can't hide his pompousness behind his newfound populism. Megan Guzman as the queen is a cartoonish lush, but no less funny for her broadness. Ryan O'Donnell makes a sympathetic straight man as Captain MacNure, even when upstaged by his cock-and-balls sword hilt.
Valera Coble's costumes are appropriately garish and clownlike, nicely complemented by Jacquelyn Scott's simple set of bright circus stripes on fabric like the exterior of a big top. A lot of amusing songs are scattered throughout the play, all of them to the tune of well-known ditties like "Good King Wenceslas," "Oh! Susanna," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" with clever lyrics by Garrett and Costello.
Patrick Dooley's madcap staging is long on slapstick and silliness, with almost necessarily mixed results. When you throw that much stuff against the wall, only some of it's going to stick. The insistent energy of the show is infectious, and it's hard not to get swept up in it. Why fight it? If you don't vote for Ubu, he's just going to cheat and win anyway.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Full Chronicle Review
link
Ubu for President: By Josh Costello, adapted from Alfred Jarry. Directed by Patrick Dooley. With Dave Garrett, Carla Pantoja, Casi Maggio, Sung Min Park, Ryan O'Donnell et al. (Through Sept. 14. Shotgun Players, John Hinkel Park, Berkeley. One hour, 50 minutes. Free. Call (510) 841-6500 or go to www.shotgunplayers.org.)
One candidate is the incumbent, riding roughshod over civil liberties, while another, the title character, is a former warrior vying to out-cheat and out-bully his current boss. Their principal opponent in "Ubu for President" is a community activist rallying the forces of "change," with a universal-love platform and the pan-ethnic name Ming Jamal Joaquin Wounded Knee Goldstein.
Josh Costello, who adapted the script from Alfred Jarry's proto-absurdist "Ubu Roi," and Shotgun Players Artistic Director Patrick Dooley say they've tried to avoid making the 112-year-old "Ubu" a satire on the election in progress. Current events won't cooperate. True, the real-life incumbent Ubu isn't running again, and Dave Garrett's clueless Pa Ubu and Sung Min Park's hilariously New Age-spacey Ming bear little relation to actual candidates named John McCain or Barack Obama. But Costello has inserted some telling parallels, including a comic perennial protest candidate.
Then again, neither he nor Dooley could've predicted that the opening of Shotgun's annual free show in John Hinkel Park would coincide with Paris Hilton's entrance into the race. The party-hearty Princess Power campaign of the self-entitled Princess Buggerless (Casi Maggio) and her killer, pom-pom-wielding posse is a highlight of a ragtag and enjoyable show.
Turning "Ubu" into topical satire is a bit of a stretch. Originally a schoolboy sketch by Jarry and friends, the old cult favorite is more of an adolescent lampoon of authority (especially teachers). Much of that material remains, some of it more frighteningly relevant than ever.
Most of the comically effective electoral material is Costello's addition to Jarry's monarchy-putsch farce. Ubu goes up against the other, mostly new candidates in an attempt to unseat the reigning King Wenceslas (a smooth Gary Grossman, with a delightful Megan Guzman as his martini-fueled queen). Otherwise, most of the carnage and potty-mouth humor is pure Jarry.
In Dooley's staging, it's an engaging romp filled with slapstick, Valera Coble's outrageous costumes, shards of Shakespeare and music director Dave Malloy's raggedly set, comically reworded (by Costello and Garrett) songs, ranging from "Good King Wenceslas" (of course), "Clementine" and "Shenandoah" to "Anchors Aweigh," "America" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The cast comes through with engagingly overstated caricatures (including Carla Pantoja's Ma Ubu) offset by the low-key drollery of Ryan O'Donnell's phallus-armed MacNure (pronounced "manure") and Alf Pollard, who designed the circus-striped set.
It also might have some unintended consequences. Maggio's performance could provide a real boost for the Hilton campaign.
-Robert Hurwitt
Ubu for President: By Josh Costello, adapted from Alfred Jarry. Directed by Patrick Dooley. With Dave Garrett, Carla Pantoja, Casi Maggio, Sung Min Park, Ryan O'Donnell et al. (Through Sept. 14. Shotgun Players, John Hinkel Park, Berkeley. One hour, 50 minutes. Free. Call (510) 841-6500 or go to www.shotgunplayers.org.)One candidate is the incumbent, riding roughshod over civil liberties, while another, the title character, is a former warrior vying to out-cheat and out-bully his current boss. Their principal opponent in "Ubu for President" is a community activist rallying the forces of "change," with a universal-love platform and the pan-ethnic name Ming Jamal Joaquin Wounded Knee Goldstein.
Josh Costello, who adapted the script from Alfred Jarry's proto-absurdist "Ubu Roi," and Shotgun Players Artistic Director Patrick Dooley say they've tried to avoid making the 112-year-old "Ubu" a satire on the election in progress. Current events won't cooperate. True, the real-life incumbent Ubu isn't running again, and Dave Garrett's clueless Pa Ubu and Sung Min Park's hilariously New Age-spacey Ming bear little relation to actual candidates named John McCain or Barack Obama. But Costello has inserted some telling parallels, including a comic perennial protest candidate.
Then again, neither he nor Dooley could've predicted that the opening of Shotgun's annual free show in John Hinkel Park would coincide with Paris Hilton's entrance into the race. The party-hearty Princess Power campaign of the self-entitled Princess Buggerless (Casi Maggio) and her killer, pom-pom-wielding posse is a highlight of a ragtag and enjoyable show.
Turning "Ubu" into topical satire is a bit of a stretch. Originally a schoolboy sketch by Jarry and friends, the old cult favorite is more of an adolescent lampoon of authority (especially teachers). Much of that material remains, some of it more frighteningly relevant than ever.
Most of the comically effective electoral material is Costello's addition to Jarry's monarchy-putsch farce. Ubu goes up against the other, mostly new candidates in an attempt to unseat the reigning King Wenceslas (a smooth Gary Grossman, with a delightful Megan Guzman as his martini-fueled queen). Otherwise, most of the carnage and potty-mouth humor is pure Jarry.
In Dooley's staging, it's an engaging romp filled with slapstick, Valera Coble's outrageous costumes, shards of Shakespeare and music director Dave Malloy's raggedly set, comically reworded (by Costello and Garrett) songs, ranging from "Good King Wenceslas" (of course), "Clementine" and "Shenandoah" to "Anchors Aweigh," "America" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The cast comes through with engagingly overstated caricatures (including Carla Pantoja's Ma Ubu) offset by the low-key drollery of Ryan O'Donnell's phallus-armed MacNure (pronounced "manure") and Alf Pollard, who designed the circus-striped set.
It also might have some unintended consequences. Maggio's performance could provide a real boost for the Hilton campaign.
-Robert Hurwitt
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