Cop and shop

ART offers more Fo the money

by Carolyn Clay

WE WON'T PAY! WE WON'T PAY! By Dario Fo. Translated by Ron Jenkins. Directed by Andrei Belgrader. Set design by Anita Stewart. Costumes by Evin Sanna Olsen. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Marisa Tomei, Thomas Derrah, Caroline Hall, Ken Cheeseman, and Will LeBow. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through October 3.

Amid the mounting chaos of Nobel laureate Dario Fo's We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, there is talk of a "premature-baby transplant." At the American Repertory Theatre, where the 1974 political farce is being performed in a new translation by Ron Jenkins, the play also features a kind of classic-sit-com transplant, with the Honeymooners team of volatile Ralph Kramden and gangly Ed Norton inserted into the Lucy & Ethel antics of I Love Lucy. Add a variety-show frame that musically spans the gap between Fo's Italy and the USA (and, in the end, hilariously underlines his theme of camaraderie in the face of tyranny) and you've definitely got "Comedy Tonight" -- even if it goes on long enough to supply comedy for a week.

We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! is getting a run for its money in these parts. Trinity Repertory Company staged it last spring in a broad, fast production set between an Italian street festival and a two-story, neon-limned cutout of the pope. It couldn't lighten the heavy hand of the standard "North American version" by San Francisco Mime Troupe vet R.G. Davis, however. Fo scholar Jenkins's treatment is sharper, less belabored, sans some of the dated tirades against sexism and "the bosses." The Italian working-class world of the play is decidedly patriarchal, with women kowtowing to bang-zoom-to-the-moon-Alice husbands. But Jenkins's presentation of it is matter of fact; the real issues on parade are those of the rage, helplessness, and, finally, insurrection that propel the comedy. And the ART production, which features Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, though marked throughout by the whimsy of Fo married to the whimsy of director Andrei Belgrader, consciously sacrifices speed and stereotype to believability and grit. Desperation, it points out, is the stuff of comedy. But it's also the stuff of revolution.

We Won't Pay! begins in the wake of a housewives' revolt at the local grocery store, where spiraling inflation has led to arbitrary, impossible prices. The women, most of them factory workers' wives trying to make ends meet on paltry wages, decide to set their own prices. Wild in the aisles, they "liberate" a fair number of foodstuffs that rapidly become as hot as the ladies' hotheaded spouses, with police crawling through set designer Anita Stewart's gray blocks of apartments in search of stolen pasta. Tomei is Antonia, who relates the headiness of the supermarket fray to friend Margherita as the two struggle to drag her booty into Antonia's apartment (a drab, bare-cupboarded spot reminiscent of the Kramdens'). The marauding police are not the duo's only problem, either -- there's also Antonia's bewildered but posturing husband, Giovanni, who cleaves to lawfulness even when "law is just a cover-up for robbery." Margherita's husband, Luigi, is less reactionary but equally hapless.

In Fo's hands, these particulars lead to some crazed and sometimes funny business involving false pregnancies, made-up saints, more heists, and people eating pet food. The one unfixable problem is that the play alternately picks up and lets off steam, the business of farce giving way, with some regularity, to political speechifying. Sometimes, you might say, Fo's anarchy gets in the way of his anarchy. And whereas his first act builds both logically and absurdly, the second is choppy. There is some bravura business, though, involving olives in amniotic fluid and dog food relished as if it were Chaplin's Gold Rush shoe. And Jenkins's translation, though stressing that the play is set "a long time ago" in a nation not our own, peppers the script with imitations, anachronisms, and American-business lingo that belie that tongue-in-cheek disclaimer. Borders are further muddied by a pre-show lounge act -- by a bad-tuxed Thomas Derrah, with Will LeBow tickling the ivories -- in which old American standards bleed into old Italian ones, from "It's a Quarter to Three" to "Santa Lucia."

Tomei plays Antonia as a cute young woman who capitalizes on her cuteness and who thinks on her feet -- but not too fast. This slows things down a bit upon occasion, but it's also funny to watch her thought processes, from the desperate flailing for an invention to the open-mouthed dawning of an idea. As her sun-frocked sidekick, Caroline Hall plays up Margherita's near-frantic passiveness, finding comedy in desperately following Antonia's leads. Spaghetti-bodied Ken Cheeseman is a funny, sympathetic Luigi, goofier and more affable than Derrah's Giovanni. And Will LeBow is very funny playing, among other characters, look-alike cops, one a ranting socialist member of the "Polizia," the other a fascisto State "Troopero."

But Derrah is the king of this hill, capturing perfectly Giovanni's mad dashes to keep up while appearing to be ahead. And as a perpetrator of physical comedy and facial expression, he invokes Fo himself, an exemplar of subversive clowning, whatever you think of his plays. The first-act finale, which finds Giovanni and Luigi spraying birdseed soup, audibly savoring "pâté for rich dogs and cats," and making like Mutt and Jeff as screaming meemies, is the stuff of another Italian export: divine comedy.