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) into legalizing their protection racket.
The play is a plum for the actor who plays Ui. Al Pacino would be a hand-in-glove fit for the part. Not so. Physically, he slopes about the stage in a Neanderthal manner and adopts a metronomic, tongue-darting tic. He is good at evoking the image of a sometimes sniveling, sometimes snarling, power-hungry hood, but the role demands more. Ui must resemble a sinister Chap lin. He must possess a chilling, demonic mesmerism. Pacino displays neither.
The rest of the cast is uneven. John Cazale does well as a funereally unctuous Goebbels, while Jaime Sanchez simply rants as Goring. The most dis concerting performance is that of Sully Boyar, who plays Hindenburg as a gemütlicher grandpapa with a Jewish inflection. The ultimate failure rests with Pacino, who leaves a final impression of Hitler as a poor immigrant boy who made it very very big.