The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

The primary reason for that commendable situation is that the true star of this Arturo Ui is a man who calls attention to himself only by maximizing the script's potential to astonish and affright: director Simon McBurney. As most serious-theater fans know, McBurney runs his own troupe, Complicité. That name signifies the complicity between actors and audience which, McBurney believes, is the pact made in any worthwhile theater enterprise. Brecht also trumpets complicity in this play: Writing in 1941, long after fleeing Germany, he needed to declare that political realities are determined by the complicity between aspiring leaders and those governed. He was, of course, chronicling Hitler's ascent and wasn't shy about including in his long, sometimes halting dramatic tract barely veiled references to Herman Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Rohm, and Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss. Brecht believed their power was not inevitable -- that, to a worrying extent, it had been handed to them.

McBurney, of course, understands this; but it seems that he and Pacino -- the muscle behind the revival -- have more than complicity between Hitler and the German population in mind. That's what makes this production into political theater of the sort Brecht championed. Using Brecht's observations on the marauding governments as well as his concern for future marauders, McBurney has mounted a version of Arturo Ui that ventures beyond equating Ui with Hitler to equate him with more immediate figures. And since Brecht concludes his ferocious play with the remark "Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again," he would probably have approved any sort of pertinent -- as well as impertinent -- updating.

The kind of parallels that McBurney draws here might be viewed by some as ham-handed; then again, Brecht himself wasn't a man who believed that the theater was a place for subtlety. He had no time for it. His urgent mission in what has come to be known as "Brechtian" presentation was not to foster realism on stage but to deal unflinchingly with the harshest realities through the depiction of unpolished, detached behavior. So, in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, he sets out the steps by which small-time crook Ui (Pacino), a "simple son of the Bronx," comes to '30s Chicago, takes over the town and, before too long, annexes nearby Cicero. The initial enablers are the Cauliflower Trust's board of directors (Dominic Chianese and Billy Crudup among them), who are upset about downturns they face in a threatened economy. At first, they position party boss Dogsborough (Charles Durning) as their nominal head, with Ui behind him. But Ui, seizing opportunity where he detects weakness, usurps command, helped by ruthless sidekicks Ernesto Roma (Chazz Palminteri), Emanuele Giri (John Goodman), and Giuseppe "The Florist" Givola (Steve Buscemi). The men ride roughshod over civic justice until they begin bumping each other off.

Along the chaotic way, Brecht uses 18 scenes, a prologue, and an epilogue to illustrate what he sees as Ui's resistible rise. Sometimes, the vignettes are brief, as when the ailing Dogsborough writes a will that goes astray. Sometimes they're anything but brief, as in a courtroom scene where communism is made a scapegoat in the person of an innocent man accused of setting a warehouse fire. Several scenes are unexpected, as when Ui, having advanced to a visible slot, decides he'll improve his public persona and consults a down-at-heel Shakespeare thespian (Tony Randall). This last is the play's funniest turn and yet, as Ui perfects his goose step, it remains ominous. (Incidentally, the reference to Shakespeare is calculated. Not only is Arturo Ui written in iambic pentameter, but Brecht liberally pulls quotes intact -- and not so intact -- from the Bard as a way of noting how the locus of 20th-century tragedy has shrunk.) Throughout, McBurney has the ensemble scurrying around like ants in a besieged colony. Abetted by lighting designer Paul Anderson, sound designer Christopher Shutt, and costume designer Robert Innes Hopkins with the help of Christina Cunningham, the director arranges things so that they are constantly involving and the images consistently stun.