The Narragansett Times

May 15, 1986

Dario Fo delightful in first U.S. tour

By BILL RODRIGUEZ

NEW HAVEN -- A delightful bit of theater history has been in the making for the past three weeks. Dario Fo has been on his first brief stage tour of the United States.

The putty-faced Italian farceur is a combination playwright-clown-mime-jester and social-satirist. Imagine the soul of a 17th-century commedia dell'arte actor romping around in a hybrid combining Moliere, Red Skelton, Marcel Marceau and Mark Russell -- oh, go ahead and throw in Hennie Youngman -- and you can imagine Dario Fo.

In New York this week, he was in New Haven last week, selling out houses under the sponsorship of Yale Rep. the author of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay, which was produced last year in Providence by Bright Lights Theater, he has been staging his Mistero Buffo ("Comic Mystery").

In the one-man show, scores of personalities flicker across the stage. In a hilarious prologue, Fo has the present pope kissing babies with assembly line speed, a squad of priests running about like a basketball team to catch them. In one piece depicting crowd reactions to the raising of Lazarus from the dead, he passes through some 15 characters.

The "Resurrection of Lazarus" piece is a marvelous example of the talents powering Fo, whose reputation has been widespread in America but only as a playwright. The jaded ticket seller to this latest miracle is the focus, as other on-lookers pass: gate climbers, a vendor of fried sardines, somebody placing odds on whether this saint can pull it off (and, if so, whether Lazarus will be fully recovered or still a little weak). Fo whips through the various personalities, changing his voice here, expression there, setting his body differently to convey attitudes, arm is a windmill of gestures.

Dario Fo, in his 50s with thinning gray hair, is unabashedly clownish without appearing foolish. This characterizations are as broad in their humor as the slapstick buffoons of his Italian heritage, which he extends as well as draws from. But few of the people he inhabits, big shots or peasants, are without social or political context or thrust. Mistero Buffo, for example ridicules those who would use a religion for their own profit. The souls of the rich are propelled past the gates of having by the High Masses they have paid for, as Fo flaps and soars about the stage. Pope Boniface VIII is dressed by five altar boys. He is assigning then parts in a Gregorian Chant, singing the overlapping parts, while struggling under a jewel-encrusted robe that buckles his knees.

Before the second act's lambasting of corrupt churchman, Fo presented a low-comedy sampler. "The Hunger of the Zanni" is a mime classic from the 17th century, depicting a peasant dreaming he is the devouring his own body in a ravenous fit. Another piece displays and dispatches lace-stuffed aristocrats of the King's Court, while mocking present day French arrogance. The third piece, based on an historical case, depicts an equally haughty English barrister, the client he is trying to depict as a pious student, and a young woman rape victim who the lawyer is trying to portray as a seductress. (Don’t worry — Fo doesn’t trivialize the appalling, he helps us transcend it, much as the peasant creator of the first piece does with famine.)

One reason Fo's comic displays are so riveting is a traditional commedia dell'arte technique that he uses: having a character speak in a nonsense "language" that has all the cadences and inflection and music of Italian or French or English, whatever nationality is being made fun of. Hearing his English barrister was a delightful but eerie experience, sort of like eavesdropping on Rumpole of the Bailey through a close the door and not been able to make out more than a stray words. The effect also is to call attention to how things are being said rather than to what is been said -- a valuable caution when encountering some popes and not a few lawyers.

It should be no surprise that Dario Fo was able to transfix his New Haven audience speaking only Italian, with a translator onstage and some translations projected on a screen overhead. This is the first time that the U.S. State Department has allowed him and his actress wife Franca Rame a visa for a short performance tour -- they were deemed subversive for supporting leftist causes. It's no wonder. Even speaking nonsense, Dario Fo makes so much more refreshing cents then the usual articulate meaninglessness we hear from Washington.