he did refer to the play by a number of alternative names, among them The Rise of Arturo Ui, The Gangster Play We Know and That Well-Known Racket. At one point he referred to it as Arturo Ui, labelled it a "Dramatic Poem" and ascribed authorship to K. Keuner ("Mr. Nobody"). Production history The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was intended by Brecht to be first performed in the United States, but he was unable to get a production mounted. Brecht brought the play to the attention of director Erwin Piscator in New York, suggesting Oskar Homolka to play Ui. Piscator and Brecht's frequent musical collaborator, Hanns Eisler, got H. R. Hay to translate the work, which was completed by September 1941, and submitted to Louis Shaffer, the director of Labor Stage, who turned it down as "not advisable to produce", presumably because the United States was still, at the time, a neutral country. The play lingered in the drawer until 1953, after Brecht had founded the Berliner Ensemble, and had produced there his major works. He showed the play around to a larger circle of people than had seen it previously, and this eventually led to the Berliner Ensemble's productionexcept that Brecht insisted that scenes from his Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, a series of realistic short pieces about life in Nazi Germany that was written around 1935needed to be produced first. His fear was that the German audience was still too close to their previous psychic connection to Hitler. When Brecht died in 1956, the Berliner Ensemble still had not produced Fear and Misery in the Third Reichwhich at various times was also called 99% and The Private Life of the Master Racebut Brecht had prepared it for publication, which came out in 1957. That same year, scenes from the work were staged by five young directors of the Ensemble. One of them, Peter Palitzsch, directed the world premiere of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in Stuttgart, West Germany, in 1958. The Ensemble itself first produced the play four months later, with Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth co-directing, and Ekkehard Schall as Arturo Ui. This production, "staged in fairground style, with ruthless verve and brassy vulgarity" was presented also in Berlin, London and at the Paris International Theatre Festival. A later production by the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Heiner Müller has run in repertory since June