Booboo Roi

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Marvin Cohen writes of Booboo Roi, his playfully anti-theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi: "In the 1970s or 1980s I read Barbara Wright's Ubu translation, which inspired me with its sheer royal barbarity of being brutal and decisive to any opposition: pure powerful selfishness. I wrote this play as a compensation for being poor, more than half deaf, and growing up in Brooklyn with poor parents ... I envied my middle class contemporaries' privileges. I felt powerless and inferior to everyone. I had childishly daydreamed of having power over everyone, ruthlessly tyrannical, so I put myself in Ubu Roi's Booboo's shoes, and got imaginary literary revenge on the world."