The Way of the World according to Mario Fratti

The Way of the World according to Mario Fratti NINA DA VINCI NICHOLS What roman candles and skyrockets have in common with each other and Mario Fratti's plays is a striking machinery: all take off at high speed, break into witty display, and end with a bang. Differences among his more than forty plays obviously matter more; yet a tight action and a lightning-bolt conclusion have become Fratti's theatrical trademark. Many of the one-act plays' especially might be called bursts of theatre, literal send-Ups of ordinary situations, either driven by misapprehension to an extreme and exploded midair , or propelled by characters' conflicting views into an epiphanic reversal. As one result, a plot's trajectory along a line of successive revelations prevents characters and audience alike from settling into complacency. Assumptions backfire. An unforeseen tum of events blows all expectations into irrelevancy. As another result, the spectator is involved in a production of meaning continuing beyond the play's end, thereby fulfilling Fratti's Brechtian wish to influence collective choice and action.2 Historical forces in Fratti, however, form only a diffuse, distant backdrop for his immediate interests in social stimuli shaping behaviour- say, preoccupation with sexual identity, or the ·wages of consumerism, greed, and self-interest coupled with a wholesale absence of affect. These supply him with dramatic occasions in which an interplay of misperceptions leads character(s) to some discovery, while stimulating the audience's moral intelligence rather than its sympathies. Essentiall~, then, Fratti is a satirist exposing deceits, treacheries, and delusions in an indetenninate world, a favourite stance leading reviewers to label him an Absurdist. On the contrary, he works within quite traditional conventions, believing in a playwright's obligation to communicate to general rather than coterie audiences, and using theatre as an instrument of social criticism.3 At the same time, his interest in aspects of contemporary life as theatre speaks to his concerns, at this postmodernist moment, with a decline of serious drama, perhaps already at its vanishing point in the apocalyptic Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 519 520 NINA DA VINCI NICHOLS phrase Herbert Blau used as a sublitle for his book, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Poillt (I982). Not that Fr.tti's theatre resembles the thousands of simulations, replays, daily melodramas, procedurals, and pictures of the "real" cut to the television hour and entering into both current jargon about our metamorphosis into a performance society, or into theory pitted against representation. Fratti represents. He makes dramaturgical capital out of OlIf functionalist4 biases, which emphasize action over content, and out of the impact on behaviour of technology gone berserk. Many plays of the I960s and [970Sexploit cases of technological tunnel vision resulting in egomaniacal , idiosyncratic, or outright lunatic conduct given a surreal appearance of normalcy. In his tragic satire The Cage (I964),5 for instance, with its humanistic themes, the hero's point of view resembles that of a technocrat with an f-stop obscuring common human nature. Of course, that's the point. Multidimensional characters of naturalistic theatre have long since disappeared into the time-warp called Now. Fratti's gallery of types seem to be afflicted with a spiritual equivalent of the technological bends. They live in their heads, deal in facts, calculate rather than think, and do both rather than feel. Obviously far from endearing, they register his ironic vision not of who, but of how we are in a sharp, white light: actors in-process in a milieu that has carried the verb beyond the edge of diminishing Ietums. Here again, Fratti differs from contemporary playwrights and theorists who either exaggerate performance and theatricality at the expense of enactment and the referential word, or dramatize the failure of stable, knowable referents in our age of signs. In the course of satirizing our plight, Fratti creates dramatic referents by contextualizing theatricality itself, and began doing so well before deconstruction pronounced the death of text, closure, and mimesis of any stamp. When the I960s were producing the unmediated presence on stage, say Grotowski's "pure theater" or presentational theatre without language or spectacle, Fratti took the opposite direction and evoked a remembrance of ritual and...