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.”
Marvin Cohen is the author of numerous novels, plays, and collections of short pieces, including The Self-Devoted Friend, Others, Including Morstive Sternbump, and Baseball as Metaphysics. He lives in New York City.