Card Table Theatre’s Brecht revival is part protest, part caution — and bitterly funny

Watching the actors of Card Table Theatre rehearse the beginning of Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, you get an immediate sense of the work’s gravitas. From the back of the ballroom inside Lawrence’s Eagle’s Lodge #309, you see the all-female cast move around as they work out Brecht’s menagerie of “the underworld’s most-fabled malefactors.” As one of actor Jeanne Averill’s characters — Barker — puts it, these folks are “rotten,” “ill-begotten,” “butchers,” a “bloody brood.”

It seems like serious business, but if you’re picturing a dark, miserable experience, the first question from actor Averill to director Wil Averill offers reassurance.

“Are we keeping the fart joke?”

At this, the rest of the cast chuckles. Director Averill says yes, and the rehearsal resumes, with plenty of wind broken shortly thereafter.

Averill and Card Table’s production of Arturo Ui feels timely, gas and all. Brecht’s work is an allegory about the rise of Adolf Hitler, set within the 1930s world of Chicago gangsters. As staged here, the show puts 10 actresses into 45 roles, with quick scene changes; this being Brecht, the changes take place in the open, with the audience able to view all that is normally backstage and behind curtains. Card Table first staged the play in May 2016, as a protest against the candidacy of Donald Trump. With Trump moving into the White House, it seemed apt to reprise the performance on the weekend of his inauguration, says assistant director Jaime Weber.

“We got great response in the first run, and now, with all that’s changed in the world, it resonates even more,” Weber says. “It’s scary. It’s very scary.”

“Even when we did it in May, we’d put it off for a while because we didn’t think that Trump especially was relevant,” says Kitty Steffens, who plays Ui. “But as he became more and more relevant, we were like, ‘Well, let’s go for it.’ ”

“We were concerned that he wasn’t going to be relevant for much,” adds Jacqueline Grunau with a rueful laugh. That changed.

“There were times when we’d be rehearsing and someone would say a line, and there’d be an audible gasp,” Kari Jackson recalls. “It was, ‘This is real. This is happening.’ ”

The company now found itself newly discomfited by the material as Trump’s surreal campaign coalesced into bitter reality.

Grunau says, “We had the family of one of the cast members say, ‘Those lines that were in there: You added those, right?’ ” she says. “And it’s like, ‘No, those are the ones that are in there.’ ”

“It’s shaped by our current public consciousness,” Steffens adds.

Brecht’s dialogue here is in iambic pentameter — the meter of Shakespeare — so viewers of the play hear Chicago gangsters speaking like characters out of Richard III, and the show contains enough Shakespearean references to make an English major clap with delight. Those layers, the Shakespeare and Brecht’s wielding of its echoes against fascism, work well in the current political atmosphere, says Erica Fox.

“The Ui character is this character out of Brooklyn, who’s undereducated and kind of coarse, so he hires this actor to help him improve his speech,” she explains. “And at that same time, Trump was trying to be more presidential. The parallels are just astonishing.”

The women continue to talk about the play and how it’s presented, agreeing that, while Brecht wrote it as Hitler dominated the world stage, this production isn’t a simplistic likening, a caricature of Trump as Nazi.

“I’m not doing a Trump impression,” says Steffens of her approach to Ui. “Aside from having a business suit and vaguely comb-over-y hair. That’s the end of it.”

The dialogue just happens to have Ui speaking in a way that’s vaguely Trump-ish, she says. It’s rambling, punctuated with odd asides to himself that aren’t necessarily appropriate to the moment. There’s the odd made-up word. But the original elements remain Brecht’s, both tied to the play’s original moment and unbelievably prescient about this new crucible.

Steffens thinks about it some more. At last, she says, “It’s a very strange layer cake.”

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

7:30 p.m. Friday, January 20, and Saturday, January 21, at Fishtank Theatre, 1715 Wyandotte

7: 30 p.m. Friday, January 27 and Saturday, January 28, at the Eagle’s Lodge #309, 1803 West Sixth Street, Lawrence

tickets here