The Proletarian Carnival of Fo's Non si paga! Non si paga!

The Proletarian Carnival of Fo's Non si paga/ Non si paga/ MARTIN W. WALSH INTRODU CTION The Italian playwright Dario Fo has attracted attention recently from major theatre journals and from American and British audiences. He is recognized as a supremely talented comic performer, master of improvisation in the manner of the commedia dell' arte, and a dedicated if unorthodox political artist, head of an innovative theatre commune in his native Milan. Fonnal discussion ofhis theatre pieces as drama , however, has hardly begun. There are several reasons for this state of affairs: a) low-comic forms generally receive less critical attention than other kinds; b) much of Fo's work is deliberately topical, with few established texts; c) Fo's political "message" and the question of its effectiveness tend to monopolize attention. This paper will attempt to make a clear-cut beginning in the direction of considering Fo's pieces as drama. It will take one ofhis best-known works, Non si pogo! Non si pogo! (We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!),I examine the particular way it works, establish its integrity as a play within the broad tradition of farcical comedy, and, it is hoped, demonstrate the continued relevance of traditional, popular forms for the politically committed theatre. Non si pogo! has received several successful productions in England and America over the past five years, most recently in Chicago at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre. In the Winter of 1982, I had the opportunity of serving as co-director with R.G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Epic West, on a special Detroit-area touring production of the play. It was financed by the U.A.W. and designed to take this workers' comedy to union locals and recreation centers. My observations on Fo's dramatic strategies, then, have been shaped by this "alternative theatre" experience, as well as by reaction to a common fallacy on the part of theatre.reviewers and theatregoers alike: We Won't Pay! is not a naive "politicization" of the American TV sit-com. 212 MARTIN W. WALSH The play is set in a two-room flat in a working-class neighborhood, the older couple (Giovanni and Antonia) and younger couple (Luigi and Margherita) bearing distinct resemblances to the Cramdens and Nortons of Gleason's The Honeymooners. Antonia in her precipitous actions and wild cover-up stories seems much like the title character of I Love Lucy. Fo's many years in Italian television as "jester to the bourgeoisie" might seem to clinch the identification; but Non sipaga! is genuinely comedic in its outcome, although its materials are those offarce. A recent book by David Grote, The End a/Comedy: The Sil-Com and Ihe Comedic Tradilion,2 makes clear what should be obvious to all students of drama: that the American sit-com, for strictly commercial reasons, has frustrated the end of comedy. Instead of precipitating a new and more vital crystallization of social and economic forces, the American sit-com achieves nothing. For all the frenetic energy of its characters, its nuclear situations remain unchanged, and must remain so for the sponsors to sell their wares. Such stasis is definitely not part of Fa's intent or effect as a progressive artist. His Marxist comedy obviously moves toward a "new society." Jackie Gleason never drove his bus to Cuba. How, then, does Fa develop his play? I would like to measure the piece against the "ritual antistructure" ofthe traditional Italian carnevale. Although I do not have time here to explicate fully the notions of the symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner, nor to separate the wheat from the chaff in Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabe/ais and His World, a seminal study of carnivalesque phenomena,3 I would like to demur to the older theories ofcarnival which see it as essentially conservative, an "escape valve" for basically stable, hierarchical societies. While this view contains elements of truth, it is far too simplistic a model and ignores the many historic coinCidences of carnival and violent political activity in early modern Europe. Yves-Marie Berce's Fhe el revolte. Des menlatiles populaires du XVI" au XVIII" siecle documents this phenomenon.4...