Ubu opens with Jarry's hero climbing from a fetal position to get his first standing legs. After three hours of stage time, this hero dies, two cross-dressed angels of death in business suits divesting him of his mortal skin, a yellow rubber raincoat. These production bookends reveal director Bill Walters' intent. By including not only the classic Ubu Roi text but also other of Jarry's writings, Walters has staged a surreal equivalent of the life and death of Jarry's own consciousness. But this concept remains a muddle, unnoticeable at least on a first viewing, unfocused, inherently opposed to Jarry's nihilism in its emphasis on human interest and certainly uninteresting.
Complete biographies lack the drive and momentum needed for exciting theater.
At the PTTP's Ubu , the audience waits for a dramatic throughline and by Act II their patience turns sour. Jarry, estimating culture as so much defecation, might have used as evidence this Ubu 's waste of so much time, talent, and a splendidly performed if too submerged Ubu Roi . This tale of King Ubu proves a royal booboo. His concluding piece earnestly and seriously depicted a Chicano politician urging understanding of Hispanics and Latinos. But he undercut that plea in his preceding material, in which he created seven somewhat different characters negatively and without depth.