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If Hitler had been a gangster, what color tie would he have worn?
To some, that inquisitive trajectory is irrelevant and even downright disrespectful. Hitler was not only obsessed by power and violence, but a monster to whom, most would say, we should never extend the benefit of a psycho-history. To Bertolt Brecht, however, the value of an inquiry into Hitler the gangster outweighed the dangers.
Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (pictured), now playing at the Catalyst Theater Company, explores Hitler’s rise to power with help from a Dick Tracy-like narrative. Brecht doesn’t quite go as far as Maurizio Cattelan, the sculptor and conceptual artist who created an apologetic Hitler in HIM, but Brecht does cast the Führer as Ui, a gangster hell-bent on controlling the cauliflower trade.
Arturo Ui (Scot McKenzie) is a fictional Chicago mobster, who offers his "protection" by force (and at an expense) to the members of the Cauliflower Trust and the rest of the industry. Ui’s deception and violence plunge his surroundings into chaos, hinging upon the corruption of the one honest man in the play, Dogsborough, a Faust of sorts, selling his soul to the devil.
Although the narrator foreshadows Dogsborough’s downfall in his first introduction, “His hair is white, his heart is black. Corrupt old man, you may step back,” an early exchange between two gangsters shows how well respected (and thus vulnerable) he was.
BUTCHER: He's honest. And what's more, reputed to be honest.So Butcher (Scott McCormick) and Flake (Elizabeth Richards) set off to "buy" Sheet's (Monalisa Arias) shipyard — a sale Sheets derides as "...a five-course dinner for the price of the tip" — and then offer it to Dogsborough for half its true value. Suspicious, Dogsborough nevertheless buys the stolen shipyard and immediately implicates himself in Ui's world of crime and intimidation.
FLAKE: Rot!
BUTCHER: It takes an honest man to swing a loan like this, a man they'd be ashamed to ask for proofs and guarantees. And such a man is Dogsborough. Old Dogsborough's our loan. All right, I'll tell you why. Because they believe in him. They may have stopped believing in God, but not in Dogsborough. Such a man is worth his weight in gold - especially to people with a scheme for building docks and building kind of slowly.
The Catalyst performance is particularly successful because of the gangters' costumes, which are just right without being too flashy, and the music, with Monalisa Arias on drums, Jason McCool on piano and trumpet, and Andrew Price on drums and piano.
The set consists of two large, rectangular boxes that function as a jail, courtroom, bed, storefront, and diner. In between scenes, photographs of Hitler are projected upon the boxes to mirror the storyline. In fact, Brecht's play is so successful because it oscillates fluidly between the absurd and the real. Ui conspires with his henchmen Emanuele Giri (Scott McCormick), based on Göring, and Giuseppe Givola (Andrew Price), based on Himmler, to kill his right-hand man, Ernesto Roma (John Tweel), representing Ernst Röhm, who Ui believes is betraying him. All these plot nuances, as well as a staged fire and showtrial which Ui uses to pretend that he has murderous enemies, is true to Hitler's story.
But the real reason to see the play is McKenzie's performance, which is so uncannily Hitler-like, from his intonation, to his walk, to his violent, spasmodic hand motions, that it would surely have done Brecht proud.
The Catalyst Theater company is located at 545 7th Street at G Street, SE and tickets are available online. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui runs until November 4.
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