S.R.: Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui in NYC

[freelancer]

Tuesday, October 22, 2002
The Arts, B1, New York Times

Scarface? Richard Crookback? The Godfather? Nope, It's a Hitlerian Thug
By Ben Brantley

To say that Al Pacino is giving the performance of his career is not to say that he is giving his best performance ever. What is true is that in the splashy, star-packed new revival of Bertolt Brecht's "Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," Mr. Pacino sometimes seems to be channeling most of his more celebrated roles. It's as if his entire professional life were passing before your eyes in a series of juicy, iconographic acting bites.

Remember Mr. Pacino's wasted, wacked-out drug lord in "Scarface"? His increasingly Marlon Brando-ized mafio capo in the "Godfather" films? His satanic attorney in "The Devil's Advocate"? And, above all, his personal take on Shakespeare's crookback king in the documentary film "Searching for Richard"?

Flashes of these portraits in celluloid illuminate the National Actors Theater's production of Brecht's long-winded fable about fascist tyranny in vicious old Chicago, staged by British director Simon McBurney at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University.

Be grateful that Mr. Pacino, in the title role of Hitlerian thug who conquers the cauliflower business, arrives equipped with this built-in animated scrapbook. And that he can translate its elements into such viscerally theatrical terms.

For the truth is that "Arturo Ui," which was written in the early 1940's during Brecht's European exile from Nazi Germany, has never been an exciting play. Yes, it features dazzingly sordid, throat-slitting goons like those of "The Threepenny Opera" and some witty bits of music-hall-style violence. But it is also a numbingly detailed and literal-minded allegory, cluttered with descriptions of business transactions that parallel events in Hitler's road to power.

First staged in 1958, it's a work that brings out the more patience-taxing aspects suggested by the term epic theatre, even with high-voltage actors like Christopher Plummer (1963) and John Turturro (1991) as the charismatically loutish Ui.

This latest version unfolds as a neck-and-neck race between the tedium of the material and the entertaining chutzpah of its presentation.

By the end, tedium has won by a nose, but it's not for want of plenty of bright and brazen showmanship along the way.

[to be continued in next post]

[freelancer]

"Arturo Ui," which runs through Nov. 3, generated plenty of publicity before it opened. The cast promised to be an acting connoisseur's delight of idiosyncratic manhood, with, for starters, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Chazz Palminteri, Billy Crudup and Charles Durning supporting Mr. Pacino. Experimental theater fans were salivating over the participation of Mr. McBurney, the artitistic director of the wondrous Complicite company of London ("Street of Crocodiles," "Mnemonic").

Then there was the little matter of price: $115 (which includes a mandatory $50 membership fee for the National Actors Theater), $15 more than the highest regular ticket price on Broadway. What's more, the producers originally planned not to invite critics, saying the show was still a work in progress.

In fact, there remains a work-in-progress roughness about his "Arturo Ui." Mr. McBurney's disciplined, formal style, which asks performers to step in and out of their human identities, is eminently suited to that famous Brechtian alienation effect.

But it poses demands that American actors known for their free-wheeling spontaneity can't always meet. Aside from Mr. Pacino, only Mr. Buscemi, a veteran of the avantgarde rigors of the Wooster Group, and a hilariously angular Linda Emond, of "Homebody/Kabul," are entirely successful in sustaining the electrified artificiality that's required.

Similarly, wit and virtuosity, which appropriately mix sinister shadows and clinical clarity, are often evident in the work of the exceptionally gifted technical team - which includes Robber Innes Hopkinds (set and costumes) and Ruppert Bohle (projections), as well as the Complicite veteran Paul Anderson (lighting), Christopher Shutt (sound) and Christina Cunningham (costumes).

Yet because "Arturo Ui" works with such a crowded canvas, too much fancy stagecraft can make it hard to understand. It's a can't-win situation, since the play becomes either hard to follow (with diversionary visuals) or hard to swallow (with a straightforward presentation of a medicinal lecture). The projection here of supertitles to annotate what's happening onstage wit descriptions of what was happening here in Nazi Germany (the Reichstag fire, the invasion of Poland) inevitably smacks of the lecture hall.

Brecht had specific instructions for staging "Ui." The show's pace, he advised must be "at top speed." And it should have "obvious hark-backs to the Elizabethan Theater."

If Mr. McBurney's "Ui" still drags quite a bit more than a speeding bullet, the production consistently brings out the play's Elizabethan aspects. George Tabori's bold adaptation of the original text explicitly evokes Shakespearean verson, blank and rhymed, and neatly sets of the work's many references to tragedies from "Hamlet" to "Julius Caesar."

So does Mr. McBurney's staging, with its exaggerated physical renderings of the swift shifting of alliances and its pointed use of a large leather chair as a throne fit for a Mafia-style king. More than any Shakespearean monarch, of course, it is Richard III who comes to mind, and there is a scene (deliciously executed by Mr. Pacino and Ms. Emond) that exactly summons Richard's wooing of Lady Anne over her husband's corpse.

[continued in next post]

[freelancer]

Mr. Pacino has long been fascinated by Shakespeare's nastiest tyrant, an obsession he vividly examined in the movies "Searching for Richard" and puts to fascinating use here. When you met his Ui, he walks hunchback-style, with a simian slump. But if Mr. Pacino is doing Ui as Richard, it is the inner pathological Richard, with no courtly camouflage.

Here is it purely animal presence, a brute whose hands hang at his sides like deadweights and whose eye sockets register as hungry black holes. This man is all id, and Mr. Pacino's enjoyably audacious performance is about an id in serach of an ego.

The production's highpoint, by the way, comes not with Ui's completed metamorphosis into a Hitler facsimile but much earlier, when Ui enlists a derelict actor to teach him how "guys walk around in the theater or the opera."

The alcoholic thespian is played by Tony Randall, the found of the National Actors Theater, who is in splendid slef-satirizing form here. To watch the older man instruc the younger on Shakespearean style becomes a blissful multilevel parody of both political performance and two distinct approaches to acting.

Even Mr. Pacino can't do a whole lot with the admonitory effigy that Ui subsequently becomes. At a moment in history when the name of Hitler is being evoked for name-calling by politicians of all stripes, any fresh insights on the man and his frightening seductiveness are welcome. Unfortunately, "Arturo Ui" doesn't provide them; it never has. It is less a sophisticated analysis than a crude political cartoon.

What this production offeres as compensation is a lively deconstruction of the Pacino persona. You start to think about how Richard III really is a template for so many of the characters Mr. Pacino has played, of how he has specialized in incarnating either Faust or Mephistopholes and sometimes both at the same time.

To see this embodied with such scary energy and focus on a stage goes a long way in offsetting the evening's ennui. Hard-core Pacino fans might even consider $115 a bargain.

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I thought this article might be interesting for those of you interested in the play. Heck, it might even drive the conversation away from Christian's birthmarks and moles.

[Angelamyte]

lol...didn't CC play Arturo Ui?
i've never seen it and basically are they saying that Pacino sucked in this play? lol...i'm an idiot..*CONFUSED*

[freelancer]

yes. once upon a time, christian played arturo ui.
critics said that he was great and that he drew a lot of ui's behavior from tony blair.

pacino's portrayal of ui isn't terrible; it's more like a montage of past pacino works that keep coming back to richard the III. okay, yeah. he sucks.

I`m no movie expert but everyone complain that Pacino`s work for past few years is a montage of his most popular roles. the guy`s so one-trick pony he can`t disappear into a role anymore.

As for CC playing what`s actually a Nazi character with Tony Blair behavior what a cool&creative way to show his dislike of Blair! I can`t stand Blair either but to base a villain on Blair, that`s d*mn clever!