An ascendant fascist right, a lame-duck “opposition party,” and regular people caught in the wake. Does this sound familiar? Well, it’s the setting of Berlin, Mickle Maher’s adaptation of Jason Lutes’s three-volume graphic novel, presented in a towering world-premiere production at the Court Theatre directed by Charles Newell. Whereas most World War II fiction tends to focus on one persecuted group at a time, Lutes’s text (and Maher’s adaptation) takes a wide view, focusing on the everyday Germans from a multitude of backgrounds whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Third Reich. BerlinThrough 5/18: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat–Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; ASL interpretation and audio description Sat 5/10 2 PM, open captions Sun 5/11 2 PM; Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $60-$110 John Culbert’s stark set, a pitch-black paved space calling to mind Berlin’s famous public squares, is the site of a post-historical inquest of sorts, as the ensemble lines up at tables with handheld microphones to review the facts. Through the eyes of these Berliners—artists, journalists, socialites, and workers—the road to nowhere starts in 1928, coinciding with the arrival of young artist Marthe Müller from Cologne. Marthe (Raven Whitley), meets Kurt Severing (Tim Decker in a Cary Grant mode), an older journalist on her train, and is launched into the vibrant social scene of late-Weimar Berlin, as well as a love triangle with Kurt and her art school classmate Anna Lenke (Mo Shipley), a horny genius who resembles Otto Dix’s Portrait of Sylvia von Harden. Jacqueline Firkins’s evocative period costumes speak volumes about Berlin’s characters, particularly Anna’s well-tailored suits. As Marthe dives into the capital’s chaos, Germany is haunted—literally in this production—by its defeat in World War I. Marthe’s arrival also coincides with the dissolution of Otto (HB Ward) and Gudrun Braun’s (Elizabeth Laidlaw) marriage, which leaves the recently unemployed Gudrun and their teenage daughter Silvia (Ellie Duffey) on the street. Duffey’s portrayal of Silvia, a young woman coming of age in the storm of history, is truly affecting, and Gudrun and Silvia’s relationship is a profound, tender portrayal of familial love in times of crisis. Laidlaw also portrays a second character, in an ingenious piece of double-casting that I won’t spoil, but hers is one of the best onstage transformations I have ever seen. Through these characters, we also meet Otto Schmidt (Guy Van Swearingen), a Communist newspaper editor who finds a home for Gudrun and Silvia, as well as his young Jewish employee David (Jack Doherty). We also meet a fascist-flapper aristocrat, a chanteuse, and a Black jazz cornettist. The musical interludes, composed by Mark Messing and performed by the ensemble, capture the heat and friction of Weimar Berlin, and the play’s focus on music is a key to its political analysis. In one sequence, the cornettist, Kid Hogan (Terry Hall), transforms into Joseph Goebbels, breaking down not the content but the music of Goebbels’s oratory, awash in Keith Parham’s evocative, icy lighting. The flipside of this is the queer utopia that Anna brings Marthe into, exemplified by a standout number where the ensemble extols the virtues of Berlin’s “lavender days and nights.” The show’s dramaturgical note by David J. Levin features photos of Magnus Hirschfeld’s revolutionary Institute for Sexual Science, and Berlin is keenly aware of the sense of queer futurity destroyed by the Third Reich. As Berlin hurtles from 1928 to 1932, marked by New Year’s Eve celebrations that become less and less jovial, Maher captures the frustration and pressure of living in a time of incipient fascism. Kurt bemoans his inability to get any writing done, and Marthe and Anna lose themselves in Berlin’s bacchic nightlife. Meanwhile, there is a prevailing sense, particularly within the Communist Party, that the left are the only people taking the threat of Nazism seriously, something proven by how readily Hitler is first ignored, then minimized, and in some cases embraced by the play’s characters. One of the most rewarding experiences of watching Berlin is asking, as we meet the characters, who will resist and embrace the inevitable history of capitulation. The appeal of fascist ideology, when coupled with the grievances of traumatized, unemployed Germans, points to a grim calculus in Berlin. A regular person’s turn toward Nazism is rendered not as an unthinkable supernatural transformation but as a simple choice of team, exemplified by Otto Braun’s shift from unemployed drunk to Brownshirt. All of the male characters—Communist, Nazi, and Jewish alike—express a deep sense of fear about the future of Germany and choose sides as a result of that anxiety. As the play hurtles to its end, the narrative begins to fragment, giving way to something much more expressionistic and lyrical. The final images are stark and shocking, in and of themselves a warning against ignoring the people who populate our history. At the risk of sensationally linking Berlin, or any play for that matter, to our current political moment, the parallels are eerie. Reading the news and looking at social media in 2025 is to alternate between seeing that our country is being transformed into a fascist technocracy and people trying to convince Americans that everything is fine. At its very best, historical fiction is instructive, giving its audience the tools to figure out where it’s going before it gets really bad. Lutes and Maher paint the Weimar as a time of, yes, great progressivism, but also considerable resentment among Germans, particularly men—a politics of grievance that Americans have become all too familiar with. The Social Democrats’ crackdown on public protest and the resulting fallout is something that we’ve seen across administrations, and the arrest of Kurt’s editor, real-life pacifist journalist Carl von Ossietzky, is a horrifying parallel with the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and other Palestinian solidarity activists. Germans, abandoned by their government as it engages in a targeted culture war against Jews, Communists, and queer people, turn either to vindictiveness or to each other, a dynamic Americans are all too familiar with as our public programs are shuttered in favor of bare-faced racism and transphobia. As the characters of Berlin recount in their overlapping narrations where they stood on the eve of destruction, we realize that we are witnessing a sort of theatrical truth and reconciliation commission. As Kurt quips at the beginning of the play, “Imagine if such hearings could be held before” the atrocities take hold. And that is precisely what Berlin is attempting to do for its audience. There is a deep sense in the play that we must turn our attention to the issues currently plaguing our society to avoid a possible future cataclysm. As Americans stare down a political abyss, theater like Berlin is more than just historical. It’s a brutal, necessary reminder that there was nothing exceptional about the Germans who lived through the death of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich. Whether they were complicit or victims, they were first regular people who reacted to what was happening before their very eyes. Fredric Jameson wrote that “history is what hurts.” For Berlin’s audiences, the pain ought to come from how they recognize themselves in the characters on stage. Berlin is sprawling, a dynamic piece of historical fiction, and a clarion call not to lose our sense of ourselves as our present becomes our history.