What a month this is turning out to be for revisionist productions of classic plays.

There’s Hawaii Pacific University’s production of "The Importance of Being Earnest" in which a male actor’s portrayal of one of the major female characters disrupts every scene he is in. Then, The Actors Group reworked Gogol’s "The Inspector General" as slow-speed silliness. Coming this weekend is the Hawaii Theatre Young Actors Ensemble staging of "Macbeth" as told by the witches.

And there’s University of Hawaii graduate student Tyler Nichols’ adaptation of French playwright Alfred Jarry’s absurdist work "Ubu Cocu" at the Earle Ernst Lab Theatre.

Jarry wrote "Ubu Cocu" ("Ubu Cuckolded") as a sequel to his controversial 1896 play, "Ubu Roi" ("Ubu the King"), but he never settled on a final version of the script and it was never staged in his lifetime. Nichols writes in the playbill that co-director Nicole DesLauries translated some of Jarry’s "original manuscripts" into English and that they then "mostly tried to simply incorporate modernity into a show that was written over a century ago" while also being "truthful to Jarry’s intentions."

Alrighty then!

Ubu (Joe Winskye) barges into the home of a cringing old professor (Marcus Lee) and takes possession. Ubu discovers his wife is having an affair. Maybe her lover is Memnon (Travis Ross), a Egyptian sewer inspector. Maybe its Swankipants the Banker (Dani Belvin). The couple’s three young Ublets — Gripshet (Jaeves Iha), Alidderashun (Justin Fragiao) and Gutsangore (Brandin Brown) — run wild but usually appear to be doing Ubu’s bidding.

Although the show contains no nudity, the sexual content and toilet humor makes the production unsuitable for people who are easily grossed out.

The cast evidently had many friends in the opening night audience who were primed to cheer and laugh with obviously artificial enthusiasm, but Brown, Fragiao and Iha earned legitimate applause for their smoothly synchronized teamwork. Lee’s performance as a mentally unstable academic is right in line with his work playing bizarre or creepy characters for other theater groups.

Lab theater is the proper place to experiment with alternative takes on well-known works or to pre­sent work that is either newly written or obscure. Nichols’ adaptation of a rarely performed play presented in a new translation is perfect lab theater material.

Those in the mood for what he describes in the playbill as "a meaningless conglomeration of profanity, scatology and non sequiturs" will not be disappointed.