Ubu Roi

If you like far ladies in sack races, you'll love Ubu Roi. Alfred Jarry's fat lady galumphs along riotously, but about two-thirds of the way to the finish line, with all that painting and sweat, she gets a little painful to watch.

It's not that the Quincy House Drama Society hasn't given her a lovely sack. Director Paul Zimet has mixed a wacky fondue of bright costumes, absurd props and hi-grade ham. Masked soldiers rush each other with pink sausages for swords, dashing about like a Polish division of the Keystone Cops. Andrew Weil as Pere Ubu, the fat man who usurps the Polish throne, leads the whole menagerie. He bellows like a bull, whines like a hyena and eats like a pig. Mere Ubu (Virginia Morrs) comes on with a Bela Lugosi accent, smelling roses, swearing at her husband and slaying a mock army with a toilet brush. Sidney Goldfarb plays a Brooklyn Hamlet out to avenge his slain father with a plastic baseball bat. Everybody bellows and jumps around.

And that's the trouble. Everything is just a little too hectic. It's more Jarry's responsibility than Zimet's. Jarry was a Frenchman who lived in a garret with two owls and a stone phallus around the turn of the century. He took a schoolboy satire of a fat stupid professor and turned it into Ubu Roi. It's a forerunner of nearly everything: epic theatre, theatre of the absurd, Bullwinkle and the Filthy Speech Movement. You can't cram that much into a play without its getting overstuffed.

So this fat lady of a play goes hopping along, never giving herself or the spectators a chance to breathe, getting very tired, very fast. And if you don't want your poor fat lady to fall over you need some outside help to prop her up.

Quincy House tries music and movies. The movies work, when they're in focus. A montage of selected orgy scenes appears on the screen in one scene break, a collection of sneers from great art in the next. Einar Anderson's score seems a little makeshift, and the orchestra under-rehearsed. But the mock-heroic music often plays against the everpresent ranting on the stage with satiric punch, and covers up some of the still-shaky set changes.

These touches are funny, and when they work smoothly, add sparkle to the show. But they don't attack the real problem. They strengthen the sack, when they should ask the lady inside to reduce. Ubu Roi needs some ruthless cutting and directional pacing. The Quincy House Dining Room isn't big enough to take two and a half hours of shouting. Have the lady skip a meal and rest quietly for a minute, the she'll bounce over the finish line ahead of everybody.