IBS: Berliner Ensemble Announcement

Cal Performances Presents the United States Debut of
THE BERLINER ENSEMBLE
in Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
July 1 & 2 in Zellerbach Hall (Berkeley)
July 7 - 11 in the UCLA Freud Theatre (Los Angeles)

Germany's Pre-Eminent Postwar Theater Ensemble,
Founded In 1949 by Brecht, To Give Final Performances
in California Before Disbanding

BERKELEY, April 15, 1999 – Fifty years after its founding by German playwright Bertolt Brecht, the controversial and ground-breaking German theater group The Berliner Ensemble will make its long-awaited United States debut in Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The performances mark the company's very first appearances in the United States and will be the final performances anywhere in the world. In August 1999, the world famous company will disband forever, ending its 50 year history. The Berliner Ensemble performances at Cal Performances, in German with English supertitles, are presented in association with the Goethe-Institut, San Francisco.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which Brecht wrote while in exile in Finland and in the United States in 1941, is set in Chicago and depicts Adolf Hitler's rise to power and how it could have been prevented. Brecht wrote the play specifically for the American audience, but until now it has never been performed by his troupe in the United States; it was premiered in Stuttgart 17 years after it was written, more than two years after Brecht's death.

BERTOLT BRECHT

Bertolt Brecht is one of the most important dramatists of the 20th century. The innovations of his "epic theater," as well as the revolutionary message of his plays and actions, imparted a new ethos to theater. Born in 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, he was publishing written work by age 16 and was nearly expelled for denouncing Horatio's phrase, "Sweet and honorable it is to die for your country," in a classroom writing exercise. He was to remain fiercely antiwar his entire life. Instead of soldiering, he became a nurse during World War I, and produced his first play, Baal, in 1918. His 1919 play Trommein in der Nacht was produced in 1922 at the Munich Kammerspiele. By the late 1920s, while dramaturg at Berlin's Deutsches Theater, he read Das Kapital and began writing "Lehrstucke," instructional plays meant to enlighten the proletariat audiences and create discussions between actors and the audience during the plays. From these seeds his theory of the epic theater grew. The themes of his plays were consistently provocative, challenging unquestioning obedience and the influence of military routine on people's ability to judge events independently; and, in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), Brecht's vision of what German society was heading for--lawlessness and ethical bankruptcy.

Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) was produced in 1928, with the music of the already well-known composer Kurt Weill, to huge acclaim. But as Fascism grew powerful in Germany, Brecht was under surveillance for his Communist sympathies. From 1933 until he arrived in America in 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, he was a refugee, moving from Prague to Paris to Denmark to Finland and finally to Southern California, where he lived from July 1941 until October 1947. He was forced to register while in California as an "enemy alien," and worked with director Fritz Lang on the film Hangmen Also Die, about the attempt of the Czech resistance to assassinate the German Reich's installed official, the Vice-Reichs-Protector. He died in Buckow, Germany in 1956. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui had its world premiere two years later, in 1958 in Stuttgart, Germany.

THE BERLINER ENSEMBLE

The Berliner Ensemble's first performance was Puntila und sein Knecht Matti in November 1949, in Berlin's Deutsches Theater. In 1951, Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble perform the opera Das Verhor des Lukullus (The Interrogation of Lukullus), despite opposition of the German government that forced the cancellation of rehearsals. He also wrote and directed The Caucasian Chalk Circle and, together with Erich Engel, Life of Galileo. He worked with students Benno Besson, Egon Monk, Peter Palitzsch, Manfred Wekwerth, and composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler, among others. After Brecht's death in 1956, Helene Weigel became artistic manager of the company. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was first produced during her leadership. By the time she died in 1971, the Berliner Ensemble had become renowned worldwide for its performances in Vienna, London, Warsaw, Moscow and many other cities. Ruth Berghaus became artistic director after Weigel's death, directing Heiner Müller's Zement, and Manfred Wekwerth succeeded her in 1977. Still funded by and in the grip of the government, the ensemble could not produce Müller's Germania Tod in Berlin, banned by the republic, until just before the destruction of the Berlin Wall. In 1992 the Berliner Ensemble became an independent private company, and in 1995 Müller, then artistic director, re-staged The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which immediately became one of the most successful productions in the history of the Berliner Ensemble. The production has been seen in Milan, Moscow, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Avignon, Lyon, Chambry, Antwerp, Istanbul, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, the Guanajuato Festival, Hamburg, Bochum and the Munich Festival. In January 1996, following Müller's death, Martin Wuttke, who plays the title role of Ui, became artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. As of August 1, 1999, Claus Peymann, director of the Vienna Burgtheater, will take over the enterprise and pursue a new direction.

THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a political satire about the making of a fascist, and is political theater at its best and most powerful. Set in Chicago's commodity markets, the story begins when a sales slump has crippled the cauliflower business, and gangster boss Arturo Ui offers to help the leaders of the Cauliflower Trust: through coercion and intimidation, he and his henchmen will force small merchants to buy their vegetables. He blackmails a powerful city official to get his cooperation, and takes over as leader of the protection racket, stopping at nothing to assure the dealers' fealty and eventually his ultimate objective: complete and total domination through fear and violence.

HEINER MÜLLER

The late director and playwright Heiner Müller is among the most important German playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. At 16, in 1945, he was drafted into the German Army, where he served briefly and was an American prisoner for a short time. He became a journalist and a freelance writer, and began writing plays about the Russian Revolution and the reconstruction of Germany after the second World War. With Die Umseidlerin oder Das Leben auf dem Lande (1961), he broke ranks with the German Democratic Republic and was expelled from its writers' organization; his plays could not be performed in Germany for many years. He continued to write plays, however, and in 1986 was eventually granted a national award of recognition; his fame continued to grow worldwide, despite the fact that his works could not be staged in his home country. He became co-director of the Berliner Ensemble in 1992 and directed his first opera, Tristan und Isolde, in Bayreuth in 1993. He had tremendous success with his production of the Berliner Ensemble in Arturo Ui, in 1995, just months before his death.

MARTIN WUTTKE

Martin Wuttke was born in 1962 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and played Hamlet at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, one of the most important theaters in Germany, at age 23. Important roles quickly folllowed: Leonce in Leonce and Lena by Büchner; Gotz in Gotz von Berlichingen by Goethe; Mephisto in Goethe's Urfaust in Frankfurt; Don Carlos in Don Carlos by Schiller; and Gilgamesch in Robert Wilson's Forest. He performed the role of Garga in Brecht's Im Dickicht der Städte (The Jungle of Cities), directed by Ruth Berghaus, and joined the Berliner Ensemble in 1994, playing Valmont in Heiner Müller's Quartett under his direction, and the title role in Müller's production of Arturo Ui. He was chosen as Actor Of The Year by Theater Heute, Germany's most important theater magazine, and in 1996 became artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. Since his appointment, he has played the role of Verdoux in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, and Orest in Iphigenie auf Tauris by Goethe.

INFORMATION

For more information, call the Cal Performances Ticket Office at (510) 642-9988 or visit the Cal Performances web site at www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

All Cal Performances programs are supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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