ARTURO Ul
by BERTOLT BRECHT
Bertolt Brecht had a stubborn faith that the task of drama was to prevent history from repeating itself. In the theater, he often seems like a classroom disciplinarian who is chalking out cautionary lessons on a blackboard.
The lesson of the drama that has been revived at Boston's Charles Playhouse is best conveyed by its full title, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Ui is Hitler. He and Goebbels, Goring and Roehm, under various aliases, are presented as Chicago gangsters who muscle into the vegetable trust (the Depression-ravaged German industrialists) and bulldoze the honest but senile leading citizen (Hindenburg)...