As Austin City Limits attendees squirmed through cheering crowds at Zilker Park last weekend, director David Long’s play featured a different type of crowd — an oppressed, silent one.

Sharing the same opening weekend as ACL, Mary Moody Northen Theatre’s production, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Gangster Spectacle” opened Sep. 29. The result was nothing if not poignant.

Set in Chicago circa 1930, the play follows fictional mobster Arturo Ui and his crooked ascent to power. In this satirical allegory of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, playwright Bertolt Brecht creates a world much like ours. Ui takes control of the cauliflower market through brute force, rendering citizens powerlessly silent to his dictatorial governing.

Through the genius of impeccable casting, audiences find themselves in the midst of this confusion. We question what it means to be a bystander, what it means to join the opposition and, perhaps most importantly, what it means to support a regime founded on ignorance and hatred.

Thus, Long takes a serious interpretation of the German playwright’s work. Actors seemingly spend more energy on willful pauses than on comedic timing. This outcome, much to the discomfort of those expecting comedic relief, is for the best.

Between scenes, a singer performs in speakeasy style. At first a nice touch, the performer becomes tiresomely overused towards the end of the second act. But the creative set-changes and lighting are worth the wait.

Make no mistake. The cast and crew of Mary Moody Northen Theatre’s latest production wants to induce deja vu. “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” begs its audience not so much to see for the first time but to remember the past and present. For Long and his cast, today’s political climate is wedged between the metaphorical teeth of pre-Nazi Germany desperation and Chicago gang violence.

Senior Kathleen McClung said it best when she stated, “The play is really culturally relevant. It speaks to what’s going on with politics right now. A lot of what you see in the media is people being bullied and the play really shows that. There’s an innate musicality to it.”

Towards the end of the play, Ui screams at both his crowd and the crowd in the theater-in-the-round while gesturing wildly. This scene is hauntingly familiar, perhaps reminiscent, of our country’s recent politics in all of their provocation and loudness.

The play leaves us on a foreboding yet poetic note: “For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

We are reminded of democratic choice. And we are reminded of how easily that choice can be taken from us.

“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” runs from Sept. 29-Oct. 9.