ENTER THE FIST Hayashi perpetuates mob mentality.

A flashlight shines on each Chicago gangster’s face, among them Arturo Ui (Hayashi), a laughably dense but ruthless mobster-monster looking to ascend in evil’s ranks. Director Berry likewise shines a piercing light on Brecht’s gripping allegory of Hitler’s rise to power. If Brechtian has become one of those eponymous terms that, in their overuse, have less meaning than cachet, whatever it signifies—highlighting theatrical artifice, thus alienating not to distance but to provoke—Berry gets it and gets it across. With mobsters speaking the stylized, rhyming language, Ui is engagingly disorienting—a disorientation compounded by a design (set: Brandon Wardell; lighting: Heather Gilbert, Jessica Harpenau) that evokes at once a specific time, no time and any time. While the complicated plot confuses (and weirdly absents Hitler’s anti-Semitism), Berry makes crystal clear the trajectory of evil rising.

Among a strong ensemble, Hayashi is exceptional; “Buy me a judge,” his weaselly Ui squawks, “or else I got no rights.” With Hayashi’s twisted frame manifesting Ui’s twisted soul, he enlists a pompous old actor to teach him to walk and talk power. The ensuing high jinks, as Ui adopts grotesque gestures broadly exaggerating Hitler’s, elicit our laughter. After Ui takes over the cauliflower trust by offering “protection” to grocers who fail to resist his resistible rise, those same gestures, now eerily realistic, elicit our astonishment. In the second act, Berry’s staging markedly loses force and focus, but the final image, slamming tight the Ui-Hitler link, isn’t a light in the face, but a slap.—Novid Parsi