the alfred jarry show!

The Alfred Jarry Show!

by

Michael Hunt

1

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…)

3

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)


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.


9

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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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?

13

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)


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...


(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.

17

(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.)


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)


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…

22

(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.”

23

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

24

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!

25

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!


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


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.”


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?


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).


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


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…


Je m’appelle Mal-au-Ventre, enchante. He

was a professional writer, with a bicycle

to transport him through

time and space

44


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


Je suis contrabandier, et vous? He was shy and sweet, but he

laughed very hard when we made

jokes or passed gas


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


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


Oui, je suis marriee. Et vous? He would ride them on the

handlebars of his bicycle


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.


Ca va Alfred Jarry? What happened to M Jarry?


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

54

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…


(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…


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?


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.


I’m in your power, totally.

Marinetti

No, no, no, say the other one…

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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.


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.”


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.”


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.


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!!


That’s right Alfred! Commodities are the first form of pollution! (exits)


(grabbing hold of the actor playing docent) Hold on there you fiery firebrand!

You’ve really got this Alfred Jarry fever, haven’t you?


69

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

70

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)

71

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

72

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

73

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.’”


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.


(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…

75

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

77

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.

78

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

80

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!


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.


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.


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!


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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)


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.


(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?


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


(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.





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.





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.





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.





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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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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the alfred jarry show!

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