Pay! Pay!

Why Dario Fo is worth the money

by Scott T. Cummings

"Laughter does not please the mighty." Thus spoke Dario Fo in 1997 on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many scoffed at the award, arguing that Fo's satirical plays and monologues are too ephemeral to meet the high standards of Literature. Others, including Ron Jenkins, know better.

Jenkins is the foremost American authority on the Italian Fo. Recently appointed chair and artistic director of the Theater Department at Wesleyan University, he has been researching, translating, directing, and writing about Fo's theater for 15 years, lately with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His new translation of the early Fo play We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! receives its world premiere this Friday as the first New Stages offering of the new American Repertory Theatre season. Directed by ART's resident farce-meister Andrei Belgrader, the production features Academy Award-winning actress Marisa Tomei, who joins a top-flight resident cast that includes Thomas Derrah, Will LeBow, Caroline Hall, and Ken Cheeseman.

In his Cambridge apartment, surrounded by artifacts from his globetrotting research on political comedy, Jenkins explains that Fo has always been quick to credit the contribution of Franca Rame, Fo's wife and collaborator for nearly 50 years, in their partnership. "She performs in the plays, she edits the plays, she helps reflect the plays back to him as he reads them. But also she brought to him the tradition of her family, which was a family of traveling players who for generations used to go around from town to town in Italy. Dario says her family tradition of theater is what she brought as the dowry to their marriage, and without that dowry he wouldn't have been able to create the kind of theater that he does."

That kind of theater has its roots in the commedia dell'arte of the Italian Renaissance and, before that, in the medieval tradition of the giullare, a kind of popular comedian who combined storytelling and clowning to entertain the masses by exposing injustice and mocking hypocrisy in high places. In its citation, the Nobel committee celebrated Fo as one "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden." Fo's modern-day giullare figure is at heart of all of his plays and monologues, which he himself performs with flair, exuberance, and virtuosity.

"That's why," says Jenkins, "it was such a fascinating and courageous choice for the Nobel committee to give him the Nobel Prize, because it is expanding the definition of what literature is, or maybe even going back to what literature was when Homer was writing and singing literature for an audience. Fo's literature lives in the human body and is part of a dialogue with the audience and has all these visual elements. That's what makes it live."

Some of those visual elements derive from the extensive drawings, sketches, and paintings that Fo generates as part of his creative process. Fo has no formal theater training; at school, he studied painting and architecture. "He works out his ideas by painting them," Jenkins explains. "He says, `If I get stuck while I'm writing, then I stop and I draw.' When you look at his drawings, you see all the elements that are in the language."

To illustrate the point, Jenkins shows me a photograph of a painting Fo did nearly 25 years ago when he first wrote and performed We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! In an exaggerated, almost grotesque form, it depicts the contorted figure of a woman with long blond hair running at full stride, looking back over her shoulder, and holding her bulging stomach with one arm as her dress slips from her shoulders. She is Antonia, a working-class housewife who has absconded with a cartload of groceries stuffed under her dress as part of a spontaneous protest against rising food prices. She enlists the aid of her friend Margherita in concealing the evidence from their husbands and from the police; the resultant comedy of errors grows increasingly anarchic and hilarious. At the heart of all the high jinks, Jenkins points out, is a basic human need, hunger, and the very human desire to satisfy that need with one's dignity intact.

The American Repertory Theatre production of We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! extends an interest in Fo's work that goes back at least to 1986, when the theater presented the American premiere of Mistero Buffo, Fo's signature work. Jenkins was then and has been on several occasions since on stage with Fo as his simultaneous interpreter; he's done the same for Rame. "That's an important experience that I draw on when I translate the plays. It's not like translating, it's not an intellectual exercise. It's like being possessed by this theatrical force: it passes through you and words come out. If I get the rhythm wrong, the audience doesn't laugh. Dario and Franca have been funny all their lives. They've been performing plays and getting laughs all over the world, so if the audience doesn't laugh, it has to be my fault. So I have learned under fire that rhythm is key."

We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! opens this Friday, September 10, at the Loeb Drama Center in a production by the American Repertory Theatre. Call 547-8300.