Fascist Mash-Up: Send in the Clown

In Wilbury’s “Fascist Mash-Up” of three plays – although really two plays and an epilogue – director Josh Short deserves praise for conceiving a radical experiment well carried out. Interweaving scenes from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht and from Party Time by Harold Pinter, the result is surprisingly more palatable than either play standing alone. By bouncing back and forth with wild abandon, the heavy-handedness of each component is softened. Amazingly, Wilbury has managed to forge two rather bad plays into a unified whole that provides an intense audience experience for 75 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of Pinter’s The New World Order. Short warns in his “director’s note” in the program, “Please do not look for a cohesive narrative in the sum of these pieces, you will not find one. If you are confused then you are trying too hard.”

Short’s expressed intention, and he is far from subtle about any of it, is to suggest similarities in ways of cultivating public support between the current presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the 1920s rise of fascism. That parallel has been seriously explored in non-fiction, notably in a March 2016 article by Amanda Taub that received a lot of attention, relying heavily on a 2009 book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, by political scientists Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler. It’s possible to make a plausible comparison of anything to anything in politics, an example in this vein being the classic of the 1950s Eisenhower era, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, noting techniques common to both Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and St. Paul the Apostle – although there would be room in Hoffer for Trump, too.

In his extemporaneous introduction before the play, Short observed that one distinction between Hitler and Trump is that Hitler was appointed while we may be about to elect Trump. That’s an historical oversimplification of Nazism, which had been amassing slowly growing support for nine years prior to Hitler becoming chancellor, and then the first thing Hitler did was call a parliamentary election in which, despite outlawing the communists and unleashing thugs to beat up the centrists, the Nazis only received 44% of the vote and were forced to govern in coalition even to pass the Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers. The destruction of the Weimar democracy, we tend to forget, took from 1919 to 1933 and it did not give up without a fight.

Brecht and Pinter found common ground as polar opposites. Brecht was rescued by the civilized West, escaping from Germany (with his Jewish wife) mere weeks after Hitler was appointed chancellor but before the Nazis could hold a new election to consolidate power and outlaw the communists. Brecht, as a prominent Marxist playwright of the Weimar era, had been a favorite target of the Nazis for the prior decade, back to the early days of Nazism when Hitler was just a loudmouth on a street-corner soapbox. By 1941 when Brecht was writing such works as Ui, he found safe haven in the United States. Brecht never thought of Ui as an important play, dashing it off in a few weeks by revising prior work, changing the setting from Padua to Chicago, as he was waiting for his American visa. He apparently intended it as a source of cash flow once he reached the United States, but it didn’t work out that way: it was not even performed until 1958 and not in English translation until 1961, but it developed a following in the mid-1960s. Critic Martin Esslin, a fellow refugee from the Nazis who coined the term “Theater of the Absurd,” wrote in a scathing essay, Brecht and the English Theatre, “On August 9, 1965, the Berliner Ensemble opened its second season in London at the National Theatre with Arturo Ui — one of Brecht’s most propagandist plays — and the critics began to rave about the precision, passion, acrobatic prowess, and general excellence of it all. Mercifully, as none of them understands German, they could not be put off by the actual content of this play… And so the verdict and final summing up of Brecht himself in England must be: if he is only seen without his words being heard, he is successful; if his texts are understood, he is a total failure.”

Pinter, by contrast, was British-born slightly too young to be involved in World War II, but in later life he adopted stridently anti-American views, accusing U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of “mass murder” in their foreign policy yet defending Slobodan Milosevic, who was on trial for actual mass murder and war crimes including “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Pinter’s fondness for torture was not merely admiration from afar, but he brought it directly to his audiences by subjecting them to his political plays. Despite Pinter’s reputation for enigmatic and obscure writing in his major works, Party Time is a simplistic play about a group of misogynist male plutocrats enjoying a party while something akin to revolution or civil war is occurring just outside their isolated enclave, forcefully admonishing the women for deviating from small talk and asking questions about the unpleasantness.

As Esslin notes, Ui has been played in various productions as “clown and fool,” as “Dostoevskian psychopath,” and as “dangerous impostor, who successfully camouflages his ruthless ambitions behind a screen of bourgeois respectability.” In my view, Brecht intends Ui, an explicit analogue of Hitler, to be straightforwardly scary. For all his goose-stepping, Wilbury’s “Arturo Ui” (David Tessier) is definitely in the “clown and fool” camp, and Tessier is a brilliant clown. That is by no means a criticism: Hitler has been effectively mocked in this way by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and by Mel Brooks in The Producers.

Indeed, the strength of the Wilbury production is its willingness to depart from the text, abridging quite a lot and eliminating a number of characters. In addition to Ui, what remains is “The Emcee/The Actor” (Phoenyx Williams), “Roma” (Diego Guevarra), the ensemble (Daraja Hinds and Sarah Leach), and an on-stage percussionist (Tom Grace). Stripped to its essence, the play is more easily comprehensible to an audience unlikely to recognize Brecht’s historical allusions, such as that Roma is intended as an analogue of Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s chief thug whom he found it necessary to assassinate in the “Night of the Long Knives” about a year after taking power. Williams is outstanding as the representative of genuine culture that Ui wants to learn how to fake.

Short’s use of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from Evita, hilariously sung by Tessier as Ui, is a clever recognition of the similar theme of degeneration of a society into fascism, in that case Perónism, and indeed that musical has another song very closely paralleling Pinter’s Party Time, “Perón’s Latest Flame,” in which aristocrats and the army express displeasure at Evita’s growing political influence (“She should get into her head/She should not get out of bed/She should know that she’s not paid/To be loud but to be laid”). Short certainly must be aware that Evita’s husband, Juan Perón, invited and supported hundreds of Nazi war criminals and as many as 10,000 rank-and-file Nazis to immigrate to Argentina.

Party Time employs a sizable cast: “Terry” (Andrew Stigler) who, Marie Antoinette-like (“Let them eat cake”), is the most vocal proponent of ignoring the chaos of revolution as he tries to ingratiate himself with party host “Gavin” (Vince Petronio), surrounded by fellow party guests “Dusty” (Melissa Penick), “Melissa” (Katrina Pavao), “Liz” (Julia Bartoletti), “Charlotte” (Rachel Dulude), “Fred” (Ben Conant), and “Douglas” (Josh Short). We quickly get the point that these are people who would have regarded the storming of the Bastille as a minor inconvenience due primarily to the likely upheaval in their social calendars, so dislikable that we root for them to be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Stigler supplies most of the menace, managing to extract what little there is to be had from Pinter’s script.

Finally, The New World Order is a brief sketch with two supposed defenders of democracy, “Des” (Stigler) and “Lionel” (Guevarra), discussing in Pinter-eqsue repetitive dialogue their plans for a man they have blindfolded, gagged and tied to a chair (Tessier). I had the misfortune to be seated directly in the line of the only light, subjecting me to the “third degree” to pretty much the same extent as the man tied to the chair, except that he had the benefit of a blindfold.

Wilbury’s Fascist Mash-Up is a valiant attempt to make a political point, but it stands to reason that anyone coming to see it is already of the opinion that Donald Trump is a buffoon in the mold of Benito Mussolini. Trump supporters would almost certainly have walked out after the introduction, and it would be mystifying why they were there in the first place. Both Brecht and Pinter were extremely influential as playwrights, so much so that they have solid claims to have changed theater itself, but their political views were well to the extreme fringe of the left, and in all three components of this mash-up the drama was subordinated to the politics, relegating these plays to minor if not obscure status in their catalogues. The cast struggles mightily against the tidal flow of the politics – especially Tessier, Williams, Stigler, and Short – and they make an impressive amount of headway before being dragged under. There are some clever and funny parts along the way, but it’s all preaching to the converted: If you happen to be the converted, then you will probably find it worth seeing.

Fascist Mash-Up (adapted from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Betolt Brecht, Party Time by Harold Pinter, and The New World Order by Pinter), directed by Josh Short, The Wilbury Group, 393 Broad St, PVD. Thu (9/29), Fri (9/30), Sat (10/1) 7:30pm. One act, about 90 minutes. Web site: thewilburygroup.org/ui-oo-ey.html Telephone: 401-400-7100 E-mail: info@thewilburygroup.org; Facebook event: facebook.com/events/528554120670230/ ; Tickets: thewilburygroup.org/ui-tickets.html