Skip to main content
“Ladies and gents,” a smiling announcer (Alyssa Beckman), who wears a glitzy vest and flourishes a cane, greets audiences of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Tobias Anderson and Michael Streeter at Twilight Theater. Are we at a vaudeville show? The painting of a red Nazi eagle above the jaunty piano player tells us no.
Welcome to Bertolt Brecht’s world.
Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote his parable of Hitler’s rise to power in 1941, and the goofiness of his script is like a nightmare made more terrifying by its slanting absurdity.
Arturo Ui (Sam Halloway) is a Depression-era Chicago mobster whose big dream is to be the king of the cauliflower business. With fabulously cartoonish gangster costumes designed by Marychris Mass and a story that scene for scene has a counterpart in pre-World War II Germany, the whole concept of the show is a head-spinner.
Add some direct references to Shakespeare and some convoluted political maneuverings, and you have the definition of an unwieldy play that’s beyond challenging to stage. Anderson and Streeter are more than up to the task, though, as they weave the separate threads of silliness, grim history, and Elizabethan tragedy into Brecht’s anti-fascist warning flag to the world.
Between scenes, an actor (Adrian Harris Crowne) performs various antics, such as walking on his hands, cartwheeling, and juggling. Behind him, though, statements about Hitler’s power plays are projected, matching what’s going on in the rotten cauliflower world. We read, for example, that the German president Hindenburg has made Hitler his chancellor just after we’ve seen Ui and his thugs manipulate Chicago’s mayor, Dogsborough, into supporting them.
To add a contemporary layer to this dystopia, Ui is dressed in a navy pinstriped suit and bright red tie and even briefly dons a puffy blond wig. Remind you of anyone?
Even in Ui’s more congenial moments, Halloway portrays him with the barely contained anger of a cyclone gaining speed, thrusting his face, which is set in a bulldog expression, forward and narrowing his eyes when things don’t go his way. As his shouting whips up a crowd of cauliflower merchants into a frenzy, he could easily be Hitler inciting the crowd at Nuremberg or Trump egging on supporters in New Hampshire.
Even before one word of the play is spoken, Laura Streeter’s scenic painting of abstract blue, green and red slanted buildings—and set designers Tim Luke and Allen Phillips’s ingeniously tilted wooden chairs with legs of different lengths—suggest that the world is about to slide straight toward hell.
This feeling intensifies with each scene, especially when Giri (Zero Feeney), the counterpart of Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Göring, gets another gangster killed, then pops the murdered man’s hat on his own head and makes a mirthful sound that’s a cross between a giggle and a strangled bray. Giri isn’t just a power-hungry cog in a fascist wheel. He’s a man who licks his chops over cruel acts.
The Shakespearean references add a deeper emotional flavor to our growing dread, especially in a breathtaking scene where Ui badgers the grieving Betty Dullfeet (a moving Stephanie Crowley) at her husband’s funeral…even though Ui is the one who had the husband bumped off. Like Richard III wooing a weeping Lady Anne over the corpse of her murdered father-in-law, Ui ruthlessly tells Dullfeet there’s nothing between her and the city’s violence now, so she’d be wise to accept his protection.
Brecht wrote his play with American audiences in mind. No theater would produce it here until 1963, though, perhaps for fear that it exposed the long roots of fascism spreading beneath our own soil.
In contrast, nothing could stop Twilight Theater from presenting Ui now: not a car crashing into their building in December or COVID sidelining cast members or even an ice storm that canceled a week of technical rehearsals. Despite these calamities, the worst problem it had on opening night appeared to be a small glitch with the lights.
Even Twilight’s awe-inspiring persistence can’t brighten the darkness of Brecht’s vision, though. At one point in the play, a nameless, injured woman calls for help and is answered with machine gun fire, which calls to mind any number of recent American atrocities. Unlike Shakespearean tragedies, which end with order restored, Arturo Ui ends with the witty announcer delivering the most chilling line of all: “Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
SEE IT: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui plays at Twilight Theater, 7515 N Brandon Ave., twilighttheatercompany.org, 8 pm Thursday–Saturday and 3 pm Saturday and Sunday, through Feb. 4. $21-$23.