Berliner Ensemble Actor Creates a Feverish Hitler

Resorting to the line about reading the telephone book counts as a crushing personal defeat, for anyone writing about an extraordinary actor.

So let’s adjust the cliche. As Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht’s gangster version of Adolf Hitler, Martin Wuttke delivers a performance so rich, precise and feverishly inventive, you come out of the Berliner Ensemble’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” believing this actor could mesmerize an audience reading a Thomas Guide street index.

The play, written in 1941 in Finland prior to Brecht’s emigration to Los Angeles, isn’t a masterwork. It’s rather plodding, in fact. The late Heiner Muller’s 1995 staging favors sleek, often hypnotic pictorialism over political investigation. Yet the entire company is first-rate, purveying a level of ensemble acting you tend only to get when high levels of skill and government subsidy are involved.

Just as so much of this century belonged to a particular dictator’s horror show, this production belongs to Wuttke’s Hitler.

The actor contorts his body in the shape of a swastika, flicks his lizard tongue in confusion, while seemingly channeling all the Max Fleischer “Popeye” voices at once. “Bravura” is too weak a word for this horribly funny characterization--which, true to Brecht’s theatrical theories, doesn’t create a character so much as sample a century’s worth of historical, comic and tragic fragments, creating its own exquisite junk heap of a human being.

The occasion is the Berliner Ensemble’s first American tour in its 50-year history. Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, the company played two performances of “Arturo Ui” at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. This Wednesday the company begins a four-performance run at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. And that’s it for this country. These performances represent a rare chance to see this storied troupe in action, just as the company itself is about to undergo a radical shift in artistic directorship and focus.

Wuttke, who’s making a “Faust”-themed movie later this year set in Los Angeles, is hardly the first artist to mine Hitler’s self-made image for pitch-black humor. (“Schtonk!,” a German farce about the Hitler diary forgery, is one of the funnier films of the ‘90s never to find an American distributor.) The actor, however, may be the first to envision Brecht’s thug, muscling his way to the top of the Chicago green-grocer protection racket, as a virtual one-man menagerie.

When first we see this Ui/Hitler, he’s down on all fours, a dog, panting madly, his blood-red tongue flashing. Once he’s learned to walk, he licks his fingers and wets down that patented, absurd Hitler haircut, moving his head herky-jerky, as a raven would. About to confront a rival gangster, he scurries across the stage like a rat.

At one surprising point, Wuttke leaps up and clutches the lapels of Dogsborough (Stefan Lisewski), the latter crouching on a platform above the stage. All the world’s a stage, and this petty tyrant--at one point taking lessons, as Hitler actually did, from a ham actor, here played by Michael Gwisdek--can’t wait to get on it. Wuttke’s is an amazing performance, and that doesn’t even take in its verbal subtleties, the wit in the actor’s ability to mutter, sputter, unleash the Furies and, finally, Der Fuhrer. (The show is performed in German, with opera-style English-language supertitles projected above the stage.)

Those new to Muller’s staging techniques will find close parallels in the grave, spare, weirdly larkish landscapes of American-born director and designer Robert Wilson. Muller deploys a passel of German and American images and sounds, scoring this production to the strains of Schubert and, over-insistently, to that infernal Paper Lace hit, “The Night Chicago Died.”

“In principle,” wrote Brecht in his journal, “it is possible to use both slow motion and high speed in the epic mode,” adding that he didn’t think epic projects needed a leisurely tempo. Muller’s production errs somewhat in that stately direction. Act 1 requires some patience; Brecht’s power plays and rub-outs among these allegorical wise-guys tend to run in circles.

Yet with Wuttke skittering above, below and throughout this environment, Muller’s rhythmic theme gets the variation it needs. Seeing this actor explain, wordlessly, how Hitler learned to develop that pathetic gesture of power--arms folded, chest-high, addressing the masses--is reason enough to see this production.

“One of the most transfixing human experiments I have ever seen on a stage.” So wrote Kenneth Tynan in 1959 about the Berliner Ensemble’s premiere edition of “Arturo Ui,” performed by Ekkehard Schall. The same, thanks to his fiendishly witty portrait of a fascist as a young man, can and should be said of Wuttke.

* “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” UCLA Freud Playhouse, Westwood. Wednesday, Friday and next Saturday, 8 p.m.; July 11, 4 p.m. $49-$69; opening night $125 tickets include reception with Berliner Ensemble. (310) 825-2101 or (213) 365-3500.

Martin Wuttke: Arturo Ui

Thomas Anzenhofer: Roma

Volker Spengler: Giri

Victor Deiss: Givola

Stefan Lisewski: Dogsborough

Michael Gwisdek: Actor

Margarita Broich: Dockdaisy

Jaecki Schwarz: Dullfeet

Traute Hoess: Mrs. Dullfeet

Michael Gerber: Sheet

Gotz Schulte: Flake

Susanne Sachsse: Mabel Sheet

Written by Bertolt Brecht. Directed by Heiner Muller. Set and costumes by Hans Joachim Schlieker. Co-directed by Stephan Suschke. Running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes.