We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! And Other Plays: The Collected Plays of Dario Fo (review)

This volume contains four plays, each introduced and translated by Ron Jenkins: We Won't Pay!, We Won't Pay!, a 1974 play about the shopping movement in Milan; About Face, where Fiat's Chairman of the Board, Agnelli, is flattened in a kidnap attempt and changed into a factory worker; Elizabeth: Almost by Chance aWoman, a parody of Shakespeare's Hamlet with numerous gags, bits of stage business, and slapstick routines; and Archangels Don't Play Pinball, a farce from Fo's 1956 to 1966 days when he wrote bourgeois dramatic works.

In the introduction to the last play in the collection, Jenkins uses a text he wrote for the 1987 American Repertory Theatre's production of Archangels directed by Dario Fo and Franca Rame at Harvard. Then and now, he somersaults us into postmodern rhetoric: "There is no explicit politicizing in Archangels but it is clear that the cadences of the comedy echo rhythms of revolt" (235). Yet rhythms alone do not make revolt and in this case the cadences of comedy predated revolt. The play, with its numerous window openings and door slammings, reminded me of the work Fo and Rame did on Canzonissima, an Italian television program. Lo and behold, after a little research, I find Archangels was written for the Fo-Rame Compagnia of 1959 to 1967, an era Fo himself called his Bourgeois Comedy Period (1983:69).

For Jenkins, Elizabeth is subversive slapstick:

Elizabeth believes that Shakespeare has written Hamlet as a transvestite parody of her indecisive policies. The theme of sexual identity and power reversal is heightened by Fo's role (played in drag) as the Queen's comic maidservant, who administers secret beauty treatments to ease her mistress's insecurities.

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While busy with beauty and assassination attempts, Elizabeth makes political pronouncements echoing the clichés of modern Italian politicians. There are moments, Jenkins remarks, when Fo breaks out of character (his barely disguised drag character) and addresses the audience while Franca comments to him as Franca, not Elizabeth. Jenkins calls this a device of a longtime artistic working relationship. I would say it is the stuff one can see in TV comedy skits everyday when the invited star never quite gets into character, and bubbles to the audience lest the whole skit fall apart. This kind of improvisatory event requires an in/out commentary to keep it alive. Jenkins writes as if he has no background in how staged humor gives trivial tricks and performance gestures a deeper level of meaning than they can sustain in situ.

Fo's performance genius is his ability to make schtick and lazzo (that would ordinarily turn into muck n' meyer) into meaningful political turns. But this happens only when there is a lively political situation and the audience is savvy to the whole point of the event onstage. When the audience is a bourgeois or petite bourgeois subscription bunch, Fo's work turns into delightful comedy with scatological Italianate snappers.

Fo's plays are written for himself and his wife and both are well known offstage in Italy as political figures, coding their persona onstage with their real-life personalities. They are in a positive sense left-wing stars. Fo is over six feet tall, has a mouth like a walrus, does any gyration for a laugh, does mime not pantomime—indubitably a great performer who used to call himself a storyteller (Gulliari/Cantastorie) (Fo 1975; see also Hood 1992). His wife, Franca, is a gorgeous woman with great gams, a full bust line, and an Italian movie star face who is willing to do foolish comic turns. When they perform there is an implicit humorous contradiction as their performance always surpasses their characters' imitations.

When Accidental Death of an Anarchist played Los Angeles...