Chris Bennion
Rudinoff (left) has three wives in one.
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Ubu
Empty Space Theatre; ends Sun., June 6
In case you haven't already, you should now officially put Sarah Rudinoff at the top of your Reasons to See Live Theater list. Playing an infantile despot in director Ki Gottberg's adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Rudinoff gives a performance so hugely entertaining you know everyone else will get a kick out of it, but so filled with singular pleasures you'll swear you're the only one who really knows what makes it work. It's a fierce clown of a role, a star turn that will have you comparing La Rudinoff to Bert Lahr and Fred Flintstone in equal measure.
Gottberg has taken Jarry's late-19th-century Macbeth burlesque and thrown it into some savage pop monarchy, with Rudinoff as its animated king. Is it subtle? God, no. It's garish buffoonery presented as political commentary; but when the conceit works, it's damn engaging. After an introduction from Jarry (Erik Maahs), who apologizes for everything we're about to see—"An attempt has gone agonizingly awry"—the production opens on Rudinoff's repellent Pa Ubu taking a very vocal dump in his diapers. He's supposed to be some high-ranking government official but he's nothing more than an oafish toddler, and his selfish ambitions get the best of him when wife Ma (Sarah Harlett, Elizabeth Kenny, and Keiko Ichinose in a snarling, snazzy three-way characterization) prods him into plotting the murder of Kingpin (Maahs again). Pa is soon sitting greedily on the throne ("It's mine! All mine! And no one gets nuthin' but me!") and setting the impoverished citizens against one another, Reality TV–style, for a few meager coins, while Kingpin's son Boogerslaw (Jonathan Martin) plots revenge in a hip-hop musical manifesto. To assuage the masses, Ubu promises tax breaks "for all good folks of heterosexual persuasions," but is, in the meantime, "emulsifying" Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a human juicer: Gates comes out as a wad of cash; Ahnuld is reduced to a big, thick steak.
These bits carry the same subversive energy as a cartoon—even at their nastiest, they feel like a lark. I suppose someone's going to feel ambushed by the nonstop aural and visual assault. Gottberg is basically just taking a large, lewd potshot at Dubya's administration, and using sound clips, video, black light, Bunraku, and anything else she can get her hands on to keep things fresh. She's created a marvelous fucked-up fun house akin to Bosch or Buñuel, and her winding, staccato text giddily suggests both Howl and Hanna-Barbera: It has a beatnik's fury, but when Pa starts sputtering non sequiturs ("Tarantula! Spatula! Fistula!"), it harkens back to Snagglepuss' "Heavens to Murgatroid!"
Rudinoff presides over all of this as though wearing a large pair of diapers and exclaiming, "By my green knob, what gives?!" were a perfectly natural thing to do. She sounds like every character Mel Blanc ever voiced, and you could swear she's making it all up as she goes along. She has a satirist's sharp grasp on character, and works the audience with a vaudevillian's understanding of the pleasures of low comedy.
Gottberg hasn't neglected the rest of the contributors, though; everybody in the tight, talented, multirole ensemble gets to make an impression. Maahs is terrific each time he steps onstage, and so is Timothy Hyland, particularly as Captain B, Pa's co-conspirator. Martin's rap as Boogerslaw is a highlight, and David Perez does some slam-bang drag as his melodramatically prophetic mother. The physical production is of a piece with the playfulness: The centerpiece of Carol Wolfe Clay's set—she also designed the winning puppets—looks like the chalk outline of a dead body as Keith Haring might have drawn it; Melanie Burgess, who created the zingy junk costumes for Ming the Rude earlier in the season, does a similarly gleeful job here (the three Mas all resemble an aged Madonna's apocalyptic fever dream).
The production can be a little obtuse—just relax and you'll eventually know what's going on—and once Ubu himself is deposed, Gottberg seems to be straining. The show doesn't end so much as peter out. (By the time of the ironic, ghostly "America the Beautiful," it's too much of a crude thing.) I also wish David Russell's music were more memorable; how much more mischievous the show would have been had it left us humming some vulgar ditty. Whatever—Rudinoff is the hook here. Her Pa is despicable, but she has the balls to make his repulsiveness a treat. You'll gladly follow her "from the Ritz to the pits, in one swell poop!" STEVE WIECKING
Crowns
Intiman Theatre; ends Fri., May 28
Talk about beating the odds! Regina Taylor's Crowns had everything against it from the get-go. It's adapted from a Doubleday coffee-table book with no plot and no central characters, just lots of glossy photos of black women in fancy church hats and scattershot anecdotes about hat pride ("hattitude"). Taylor is a playwright better known as an actress (I'll Fly Away, Courage Under Fire, Anita Hill in Strange Justice), and she's had a run of bad luck: Her adaptation of The Seagull flopped on Broadway, and she got dumped as librettist of the Broadway-bound adaptation of The Color Purple. And Taylor doesn't even wear hats—she's from the post-hat, complicated-hairdo generation.
