Playwright: Bertolt Brecht, adapted by George Tabori
At: Steep Theatre, 3902 N. Sheridan
Phone: 312-458-0722; $18
Runs through: July 7
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Bertolt Brecht's principle of Verfremdungseffekt—'feeling like a foreigner'—sought to distance audiences from the events onstage, the more easily to contemplate the latter's philosophical dimensions. For over half a century, this has been accomplished by stripping his plays' performance of actorly flourishes to render it as dry as news bulletins. But distance can also be created by taking the other direction—that is, by exaggerating the artifice so broadly that the emotions become as insignificant as those of cartoon figures. Vitalist Theatre's voluminous staging of Mother Courage and Her Children last season employed precisely this tactic to overwhelming success, as does this Steep Theatre production.
Our story recounts the rise of Germany's Third Reich—the upstart Arturo Ui being a stand-in for Adolf Hitler—through the analogy of American crime bosses during the prohibition era dubbed the 'Roaring Twenties,' as portrayed in the popular films of the following decade. Translator-adapter George Tabori knows his Hollywood gangsters, reveling in generic icons, even to somebody snarling 'You dirty rat!' during a reenactment of the St. Valentine's Day massacre. He also knows his Shakespeare, the text now liberally sprinkled with allusions immediately recognizable to English-speaking audiences—e.g. 'Is this a Lugar I see before me?', or the scene where Ui makes love to the widow of his latest victim over her late husband's coffin.
Director Jonathan Berry knows the dynamics of big stories in small rooms, however, and that the drollery of blank verse declaimed in Damon Runyon accents, however fluent, is not enough to keep us entertained for two and a half hours. So a courtroom trial is summarized in a series of blackouts bridged with musical-chorus dance set to a looney-tunes jazz arrangement of a funeral march. Ui hires a down-and-out thespian to teach him how to 'talk fancy,' resulting in a spoken-word duet of Marc Antony's oration as intricately baroque as a Bach toccata.
But while playgoers already aware of Brecht's punchline may spot in this exercise the mannerisms that will ultimately emerge as the familiar gott-und-reich motifs, the Steep ensemble never bludgeons us with the obvious—the armbands cleverly suggest Nazi regalia without a swastika in sight—but instead encourage us to immerse ourselves wholly in the dazzling swiftly-paced spectacle. And we do, right up to the final moment, when company member Yosh Hayashi drops his paintbrush moustache and Crazy Joe voice to issue us a quiet warning confronting us with our gullibility.