Review: USF School of Theatre & Dance Presents Bertolt Brecht's THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI

“The world was almost won by such an ape! The nations put him where his kind belong. But don't rejoice too soon at your escape...The womb he crawled from is still going strong.”      --from THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI

“It is happening again.” --The giant in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”

Timing is everything, in both life and art. And this is especially true of theatre, when we are watching shows written decades or sometimes centuries ago and they still seem to mirror recent events.  Sometimes this is jarring, as when I saw Mad Theatre’s  Cabaret and Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche at Stageworks the same week as the Pulse shootings.  Or, at American Stage, watching The Royale, a play about race in sports, the same week that Colin Kaepernick bravely took a knee during the National Anthem. Or experiencing Tartuffe and Assassins just days prior to the 2016 election, and then not long after that day, witnessing Ionesco’s frighteningly hilarious Rhinoceros.  Or just last year, watching a high school production of the Holocaust-themed I Never Saw Another Butterfly immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. 

And now with Bertolt Brecht’s THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, written over eighty years ago and winningly performed by the USF School of Theatre and Dance, I once again find myself looking inro a mirror of our present day.  Would the play have the same power for me had it been performed prior to November 5th? Because while watching it and knowing it is a comedic and terrifying gangster-land satire of Hitler, all I could think about was Brecht’s words reflecting our present-day political madness.  We leave the theatre of satire and enter our new frightening reality the moment we step outside into the cold.  The play is like a splash of hot coffee across our collective faces, jolting us awake; not that we need that wake-up call after the last election (or perhaps some of us--many of us--still do).

Brecht adored Charlie Chaplin, and you can see parallels to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, which is quite funny and terrifying in the same breath.  The play chronicles the pre-Invasion years of Hitler using Chicago as its Germany, with each character coinciding with its Third Reich counterpart. With the real-life fascists transforming into Brechtian mobsters, Arturo Ui (pronounced "ooowee") is obviously modeled after Hitler. Dogsborough is the pathetic Von Hindenburg.  The “Girl” in the play is Hermann Goring, while Roma is obviously Ernst Rohm.  And Givola is a satiric reflection of Goebbels.  Instead of Prussian Junkers, we have the Cauliflower Trust.  There’s even the burning of Reichstag in the form of a warehouse fire. It’s all here, humorously and horrifically, to re-experience in the form of satire and for us to ultimately compare to our modern world.

The large cast is quite good, with a stunning performance by Cody Farkas leading the way as Arturo Ui.

Resembling the mustached Robert DeNiro in his King of Comedy phase, Mr. Farkas has the uncanny ability to look both nonchalant and energetic, both matter-of-fact and alarming, both comfortable in his skin and at times appropriately awkward,  both friendly and dastardly, as he triumphs his will to power.  He zaps each scene with energy, sizzling the stage with his presence. We never know exactly what he's going to do next. 

The highlight of the show is when a terrifically engaging Michael Vega as The Actor teaches Ui how to stand, walk, and even sit like an authoritarian  leader.   Ui is told: “Sitting. Sitting is the hardest, Mr Ui. Yes, some people can walk, and some people can stand; but show me the man who knows how to sit.” And we laugh as Mr. Farkas tries a variety of these poses, almost like watching Albin trying to strut like John Wayne in La Cage a Folles.  I laughed aloud watching Mr. Farkas tackle these preening poses when suddenly I stopped, because I realized that these were the exact poses mastered by Hitler.  I guess if you watch Hitler parade almost effeminately, pouting and prancy with the sound turned down, it could be quite funny…until you realize that this cavorting creature was responsible for the deaths of six million Jews. 

That’s what makes THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI and especially Mr. Farkas’ spot-on performance so incredibly formidable: We laugh in spite of our knowledge of the depths that mankind can descend in search for power.  

At the opening, when the players are introduced, the cast applauded Arturo Ui’s name, and responding almost sheep-like in return, so did the audience. I wondered in that moment if they realized that they were applauding the Brechtian incarnation of Hitler.

The rest of the cast offers ample support, including Victoria Flounders as Ernesto Roma, Megan Phillips as Emanuele Giri, Kyle Duncan as a particularly robust Clark and Prosecutor, Christopher Jackson (looking like the bearded President Benjamin Harrison) as Old Dogsborough, the aforementioned Michael Vega in a variety of turns, and especially Seth Henley-Beasley as Giuseppe Givola.  The talented ensemble includes Kristen Brazzell, Matthew Gasperino, Bailey Freye, Pax Matos, Ava Meyer, Daaryl Wilson, Preston Kifer, William Ashburn and Aidan Kaisar. 

The show is more than two and a half hours long but you lose time while watching it.  Because it moves about constantly, high and lows, silences and screams, stillness and action, at an incredibly tight pace.  And anything goes.  There’s a moment where two key characters stride about as if they took lessons from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks, and I couldn't help by smile at the audacity of this choice by the playwright and director. 

Kristen Martino’s set design is like a gothic lair, intimidating. Beau Edwardson’s lighting design is stark and highlights the key moments without overdoing it.  Liz Bourgois costumes certainly work for the gangland time period.  Maeve Lyrek, as prop designer, utilizes playful orange pistols and even an inflatable machine gun as weapons that look like something out of Bugsy Malone; the choice for unrealistic weaponry keeps the cartoony comedy in check, because these playful, nonthreatening props include real gunfire sound effects and actually kill so many characters. The contrast between the goofy props and the horrific gunshot deaths certainly works.

And the sober ending left me breathless.    

The visionary director, David J. Valdez, has a true artist’s eye.  The tableaux’s he creates, the stage pictures, are second to none.  I like how, during several group scenes, an occasional actor will stand still with his or her back to the audience, marvelously messing with the damned symmetry.  Violence and laughter walk hand in hand with Mr. Valdez at the helm of Brecht’s world.  In one scene, a main character gets shot in the head with a loud bang, and before you can suck in your breath in shock, the romping radio sounds of “Tiptoe Thru the Tulips" plays so light-heartedly.  Wonderful!  The last song played in the production--the Skeeter Davis hit, “It’s the End of the World”--brings it all together: Such a soft, sweet-sounding song of a heartache so deep that the world ends.

The play balances on a teeter-totter between two worlds--the funny and the deadly. And Mr. Valdez beautifully combines these two elements--the laughter and the stings hitting us at the same time.

Funny as much of it is, THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI is a frightening piece of work, and to me, the key word in the title is “Resistible.” These things can be stopped, but as the director pointedly mentions in his program notes, they are enabled by a mixture of events--“economic despair, political corruption and pubic apathy.”  That’s the world we live in now.  Antipathy for the economy (no matter how good it is compared to other nations), fear of some sort of otherness out there (immigrants in today’s world), add a dash of a genuflecting press along with a pinch of ignorance and a heaping helping of voter apathy (“Who cares, so what?” as is sung in Cabaret), and you get the events in THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI as well as the results in our last national election.

That’s why the final words of Brecht’s scathingly funny screed lacerates us so.  We find ourselves in a moment where we must either embrace or fight, kowtow or stand up, stay silent or bark.   But what will we ultimately do because, in the words of the “Twin Peaks” giant, “It is happening again.”  Or as Brecht so brilliantly put it…

“This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

USF'S THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI plays at USF's Theatre 1 and ends its run on  Saturday, November 23rd at 2:00 and 7:30 PM.  

Photo Credit: Sylvie Mae Baldwin

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