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.
