Visionbox Studio Tackles Fascism With The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

With authoritarian leaders once again gaining ground across the globe, Denver’s Visionbox Studio is opening its 15th theater season with a play that feels alarmingly current. Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in 1941 as a satire of Hitler’s ascent to power, transplants the story to 1930s Chicago gangland. The parallels between then and now, Visionbox founder and the play’s director Jennifer McCray Rincón insists, are impossible to ignore.

“This play is so timely, I could pass out,” Rincón says. “The last line is: ‘The bitch that bore him is in heat again.’ It’s a reminder that these patterns repeat, over and over. This is happening, it has happened throughout humanity and it will keep happening, but I’m 67 years old, and this is perhaps the most stressful moment in our history … The world we’re living in is not okay, and if we don’t talk about it in a safe environment, it will get worse.”

That conversation begins on stage this weekend. Through satire and grotesque comedy, Brecht charts the rise of Ui, a small-time mobster who muscles his way into control of Chicago’s cauliflower trade. As Ui transforms from a clownish thug into a feared dictator, Brecht exposes the danger of authoritarianism and challenges audiences to consider how easily such figures are enabled.

“Brecht wrote about the human condition, but his style of theater was not about three-dimensional realism,” Rincón says. “It’s very much based on Greek theater, so that the characters are captured in a kind of archetypal and even stereotypical way, and there’s no fourth wall. It’s a political satire that layers Hitler’s rise to power with gangster movies of the 1930s and Richard III.”

Visionbox’s ensemble brings this allegory to life on October 4 and 5 at the Elaine Wolf Theater in the Mizel Arts and Culture Center, with longtime company member David A. Walker in the title role. “We worked on scenes from the play in class, and David was mind-blowing,” Rincón explains. “This is a language-driven piece, but also very action-driven. Not every actor can pull it off. David can.”

For Walker, who has been with the company since 2017, the opportunity is both daunting and exhilarating. “This is a banquet,” he says. “The character is huge. Gigantic: the language, the levels, the irony, the reality, and, hopefully, the impact it has. What I keep hoping is that this will really make people think. You can look at it from any political vantage point and still see the echoes of what has gone on and is going on.”

Rincón’s decision to stage Arturo Ui was also shaped by profound personal loss. Last December, her daughter Sonia and son-in-law Willy Herrera were killed in a car accident. When Willy’s Ecuadorian parents were denied visas to attend his funeral in Denver, the cruelty of bureaucracy deepened her grief. 

“That his parents couldn’t come see their son’s body — that’s this play,” she says. “His parents couldn’t come to the funeral because of politics. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. I had to hire a videographer to live stream their son’s body in a coffin with my daughter’s body in a coffin so they could, in some way, see their son. Then, spending a month with Willy’s family in Ecuador this summer, I saw how they valued love and connection over money or fame. That made me come home determined: I have to work to go on living, and this play is the way to do it because of the political and human context of the world we’re living in.”

Rehearsals have reflected Brecht’s style: fast, unpredictable and sometimes chaotic, but always anchored in the ensemble’s commitment to craft. Walker describes the experience as peeling back endless layers of complexity: “There’s a simplicity to Brecht, but not an ease. Once you start digging, it becomes overwhelming how much there is.” 

“It’s simple but not easy,” Rincón adds with a chuckle. “The play just feels very timely. My whole family are immigrants, but that was back when there was freedom to enter this country and make a life here that has now been killed.”

Though the play has been a part of Rincón’s professional journey for decades (she assisted on Williamstown productions in 1979 and 1988), she says it has never felt more relevant than it does now.

“This play is more pertinent now, in 2025, than any of those years,” Rincón says. “All over the world, there are these ridiculous, strange people rising to political power, oppressing people. That is destroying our humanity. Nazi Germany was the most horrific period in our imagination recently, but things are going on in the world today that are completely similar. Violence and cruelty are happening all over the world right now, and I hesitate to mention this, but I don’t know that the United States is any better.”

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui runs Saturday, October 4, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, October 5, at 4 p.m. at the Elaine Wolf Theatre, 350 South Dahlia Street. Learn more at visionbox.org.