Ben
Brantley

July 23, 2015

Vive l’adolescence! The spirit of rancorous rebellion that rumbles within every teenager is storming the bourgeois barricades in Cheek by Jowl’s inspired rethinking of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi,” the satirical drama that once rattled Paris to its foundations, which runs through Sunday at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Though this flamboyantly vicious play first opened in the late 19th century, contemporary parents will find much to disturb them in its portrait of a murderous Macbeth-like monarch and his fiendish queen. Not that Mom and Dad are likely to identify directly with these filthy (rich and otherwise) royals. But they may well suspect, with a shudder, that what they’re seeing onstage is more or less what their high-school-age sons and daughters see when they look upon their doting parents. Like many visions born of disgust and hormones run riot, this one is a horror to behold. Yet it’s impossible not to be transfixed by the raging force of its energy.