THEATER
Classic Stage Company
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
“With a cast of wily, willing storytellers headed by a blistering good Raúl Esparza, John Doyle’s Arturo Ui is a sly, fearsome sideshow, a deceptively humble, hugely exciting piece of work…It’s Richard III meets Jimmy Cagney by way of the vaudeville circuit, and in the hands of Doyle and his actors, it’s both rollicking and frightening.”
– Sara Holdren, New York Magazine / Vulture
– Sara Holdren, New York Magazine / Vulture
“The eight ensemble members here are delightfully resourceful. You could even imagine this version of Arturo Ui winning the flinty heart of its author for its imaginative interpretation of the Brechtian dictates of style and sensibility.”
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times
★★★★ “You laugh at him, you fear him, you realize you know him. You certainly can’t resist him”
– Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
– Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
In 1930s Chicago, mobster Arturo Ui will stop at nothing to control the cauliflower trade. Terror and bloodshed follow. Can anyone stop him? Brecht’s skewering of Adolf Hitler and totalitarianism is given renewed significance in a production directed by John Doyle. Written in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensemble’s greatest box office successes.
‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ Review: A Man of Führer Words
John Doyle’s revival of Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire about a Hitler-like Depression-era Chicago gangster largely avoids nudge-nudge references to the present moment.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.
As fine an artist as Mr. Doyle is, and as excited as I was by the prospect of seeing Raúl Esparza in the title role, I was more than a little bit apprehensive about this production going in. “Arturo Ui,” after all, isn’t one of Brecht’s masterpieces—its satire is too cartoonish—and I’ve seen a fair number of shows in recent months whose claims to artistic seriousness were undercut by the willingness of their makers to stoop to over-obvious anti-Trump pandering. But Mr. Doyle mostly avoids blatant point-making, instead giving us an electrifyingly coarse and colloquial show into which Mr. Esparza’s complex performance fits with surprising neatness.
When Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble came to London in 1959 to perform “Arturo Ui,” Kenneth Tynan described the play as “a jagged, raucous parody of Hitler’s rise to power” performed in a manner “somewhere between Erich von Stroheim and the Keystone Cops.” Mr. Doyle, who designed Classic Stage’s production in addition to directing it, is aiming for the same effect, keeping in mind at all times the couplet spoken at play’s end and rendered as follows by George Tabori, whose pungent translation is used in this revival: “If we could learn to look instead of gawking, / We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.” Not only is the action of the play, which unfolds in a fluorescent-lighted warehouse, grotesquely comic in tone, but Mr. Esparza turns Ui-Hitler into a figure of fun (his whiny, nasal voice reminded me of Jerry Lewis).
At the same time, though, he also plays the dictator as a man given to startling outbursts of self-pity and doubt, a quality remarked on by many people who knew Hitler personally, Albert Speer among them. Only at the end of the play, when Ui (whose name is here pronounced to rhyme with “phooey”) has finally attained power, does his personality come fully into focus and we see him for what he is, a monster capable of doing anything necessary to get what he wants, up to and including ordering the killing of his closest friend.
Raúl Esparza Photo: Joan Marcus
Mr. Doyle’s staging, which attends to the Brechtian book of rules—everything is played straight out to the audience with glaring clarity—without being rigid about it, is full of touches for which the right word, unlikely as it sounds, is “elegant.” I loved the moment when he turns a folding table into a coffin by simply covering it with a white sheet and a handful of rose petals. Then Mr. Esparza pulls the sheet off the table, covers himself with it and sinks to the floor, beset by a Shakespearean nightmare vision of Ernesto Roma, the friend he has murdered (outstandingly well played by Eddie Cooper). A moment later, he flings the same sheet over his shoulder, turning it into a toga, and delivers the climactic oration in which he proclaims his plan for the future: “New York! New York today! The world tomorrow!”
It is in this speech that Mr. Doyle draws for the first and only time a crudely explicit parallel with the contemporary object of his satire, making the crowd listening to Ui yell “Lock her up! Lock her up!” It’s as if a reformed shoplifter, having successfully strolled all the way through a store without pinching anything, slipped a pack of gum into his pocket at the cash register before walking out the door. Otherwise, though, his “Arturo Ui” is free from such lapses of taste, though I didn’t care for the interpolated radio bulletins in which an announcer spells out the factual basis for each scene (“Reichstag Fire Trial Ends in Uproar!”). Perhaps Mr. Doyle fears that his audience knows nothing of Hitler’s rise to power—and he may, of course, be right. Otherwise, this production not only serves “Arturo Ui” with full faithfulness (save for the absence of incidental music, a surprising and unfortunate omission) but is the ideal vehicle for Mr. Esparza’s sensational performance. Brecht was a hard man to please, but my guess is that he would have liked it very much.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
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