THEATER REVIEW : ‘Chains’ a Solid L.A. Debut for All-U-Can-Eat Players

While waiting in line for a show a few weeks ago, a theatergoer argued that, with the volume of plays in Los Angeles (more than 150 playing at last count), surely there was room for “difficult” plays along with the “easy” ones. Plays by, say, Samuel Beckett and Franz Xaver Kroetz and Alfred Jarry.

This was before the World Theatre opened Jarry’s “Ubu in Chains”--in the same neighborhood where you could see a “remake” of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” titled “Godex Has Come” or a staging of Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves” (now closed).

Not all these productions may be world-beaters, but we can report that at the World, something remarkable is going on. The All-U-Can-Eat Players--made up mostly of young alumni of Indiana University--is doing the 93-year-old “Ubu in Chains” as if it were new.

Eleven years ago, another group of college escapees--the Actors’ Gang--did “Ubu the King,” the first in Jarry’s quartet of absurdist plays about the ruthless King Ubu of Poland, at the long-departed Pilot Theatre, just down the boulevard from the World. They’re still working in the same neighborhood.

Yet even though the All-U-Can-Eaters share with the Gang such elements as propulsive percussion accompanists (the vital trio of David Allen Kramer, Andy Lynch and Laura Russell) and a powerful display of a physical performance style that both attacks and tickles, this is an ensemble paving its own road with indefatigable confidence.

If anything, this second Ubu tale is more clearly and crisply put across than the Gang’s wild approach to Ubu I. This is helpful, because “Ubu in Chains” is rarely done. In sum, the bad old king (Joe Alaskey) and queen, Ma Ubu (Kathryn Ann Kelly), booted out of Poland for their tyranny, are hatching a new plot in exile in France. In this land of “freedom,” the Ubus reckon, they can make a mockery of the order of things by insisting on being slaves.

While the original “Ubu” became for Europe a bitterly comic precursor of Hitler and Stalin, this “Ubu” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor) says something about the current global wave of democracy, how the idea of freedom is so much safer than the reality and how evil can transform wrong into right, up into down.

It’s this topsy-turvy logic, the deadly irony that fuels the Ubu nightmare, that director Jonathan Emery and his cast fluidly translate into a relentless series of nutty stage pictures on an uncredited set of black floors and white doors flooded by footlights. It’s led by Alaskey’s beefy presence and bullhorn voice and Kelly’s extraordinary timing and wacky, off-kilter delivery--Eva Peron, by way of Lucy Ricardo.

The others, too, are clearly gifted comics: Noelle Kramer, Brian Peck, Tuc Watkins and the threesome of Vincent Ventresca, Sean Sullivan and Benjamin Livingston as the Mack Sennett-like “army of France.” This army from Indiana has made a welcome invasion.

“Ubu in Chains,” World Theatre, 6543 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 28. $10; (213) 962-3771. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.