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Theater 33.3 (2003) 135-137



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Resisting the Resistible



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Figure 1
John Goodman, Al Pacino, and Steve Buscemi in the National Actors Theater's production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Simon McBurney, New York, 2002. Photo: Joan Marcus

Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was presented in October 2002 by the National Actors Theater (NAT) in New York, and the result was less a production than the scene of a traffic accident. Colliding there were the NAT's flimsy schema, the ambition of Al Pacino to play Arturo, and the sway of Simon McBurney, the director. All through the performance I felt that I was surveying wreckage.

The first victim was the National Actors Theater. What is it? Not what its title says it is. It is not national—it is located in New York—and it is no more an actors' theater than any other production. The enterprise was launched in 1991 by Tony Randall, who had large but gauzy ambitions, questionable judgment, and a lot of money that he had earned in television. (It was supplemented by donors.) The NAT under Randall has presented a number of great plays with widely varying artistic results, but it has never resolved into a company with perceptible long-range purpose. Continuity and growth and a sense of ensemble have been blatantly absent. I have seen fewer of their productions than has Michael Feingold, and he writes, "I have been going to the NAT for a decade now, and I still don't know what it is." This Brecht instance looked as if Pacino's ambition had crashed into whatever was left of Randall's nebulous aims and had left the raison d'être of the NAT even more shaky. Whether it will survive this collision and what its future productions will be are questions that do not bate the breath.

The Brecht play was done in an auditorium at Pace University, not only with Pacino in the lead but with a number of well-known film actors in the cast, including Randall. The venue and the cast announced that some high-salaried people were proving their anticommercial humility. The nub of the venture was, of course, Pacino's long-nurtured ambition to play Ui. He had done it in his prefilm days in Boston, and in 1974, after his first film successes (including The Godfather), he had rehearsed it in a workshop at the Public Theater. "We will evaluate it," Joseph Papp had said while the workshop was in progress, "and then groom it for the Vivian Beaumont," the Lincoln Center theater that he then managed. Evaluation must have been negative; the production never opened.

Thus early, however, Pacino was a bifurcated figure. Besides his first films, I saw him off Broadway in The Indian Wants the Bronx and The Local Stigmatic, on Broadway in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, and at the Beaumont in Camino Real and had recognized that this long-waisted, short-legged actor was, at his best, a high-voltage dynamo. I followed his screen career with recurring admiration, but I knew—it was no secret—that he had concomitant theater plans. Among them were Arturo Ui, Richard III, and Herod in Wilde's Salome, all of which he had already performed. (The third of these monsters he has recently done again in a public reading). Now that he has brought about this large production of the Brecht play, perhaps his Arturo ambition is satisfied. [End Page 135]


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Figure 2
Steve Buscemi, Michael Goldfinger, Matte Osian, Tony Randall, and Al Pacino in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Photo: Joan Marcus

His yearning for Arturo has always seemed peculiar from the sheerly theatrical point of view. Perhaps it meant little to Pacino that the play has never ranked high in the Brecht canon: (Martin Esslin, an apostle of Brecht, called it an ambitious project that failed.) More pertinently to Pacino, the title role is not the dominant one. Brecht, writing in 1941, wanted to demonstrate analogically...

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