Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

On Tuesday we went to see The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht.  My first introduction to Brecht was through the film The Lives of Others, where by reading Brecht a member of the Stasi secret police transforms into a compassionate human being.  The storyline of Arturo Ui is set in mobster Chicago and serves as a parable for how Hitler rose to power. It's a hard play with gangsters, blackmail, shootings, and betrayal, but I absolutely loved it.  It's one of those difficult pieces that just made sense to me.

I think a lot of it had to do with the translation by George Tabori. I originally thought it was written in English because the iambic pentameter was amazing (!!) and had a Shakespearean hint about it.  The second thing was the Chicago accents of the 1930's.  The crew of actors were the most believable I've ever seen, and although I never "forgot" I was in the theater, the actors themselves were far better and made the characters more believable than even Shakespeare's Globe performances I'd seen.  The set and crew were phenomenal, slowly accruing Nazi paraphernalia as the performance rose to a climax.  The charm was the actors; the time period; the clothing, cigars; but the story. The story was harrowing because it was true. And somehow I now have a new favorite writer.