Italian Incendiary

A ticket costs 80-c-. No critics are invited. The playgoers are peasants and factory workers. The show is called Grande Pantomima con Bandiere e Pupazzi Piccoli e Medi (Grand Pantomime with Banners and Puppets Small and Medium), and it is a phenomenal theatrical event. On its present tour, which began last October, it has played in 138 different towns and villages of northern and central Italy, mostly on one-night stands, to audiences ranging from 500 to 3,000. Everywhere the reception is astonishing. One evening recently, in the tiny village of San Martino in Fiume, 540 of the 800 inhabitants came to the performance.

The man who incites this kind of turnout is Dario Fo, 42, actor, playwright, dramatic apostle to the proletariat, and currently Italy's most incendiary theatrical personality. Social protest flows from Fo's work but it bubbles with laughter. He conceived of Grand Pantomime as a kind of cartoon political morality play about Italy from World War II to the present. Intransigently anti-Fascist and bent on exposing what Fo considers crypto-Fascism, the play is deeply concerned with the exploitation of workers under whatever form of economy and government. Fo calls his own political stance "extreme free left," but he has no political affiliation. He writes with a porcupine quill and no one, right, left or center, escapes.

Out from the Innards. As the play begins, a ten-foot-tall puppet with a bilious, wart-covered face lumbers to the center of the stage and mumbles unintelligible words from an ugly rubber mouth while wielding a black plastic truncheon. "Kill the dirty Fascist!" shouts a group of men in turtleneck sweaters as they start to beat the puppet's swollen belly. Out from the puppet's innards steps a shapely brunette in a bathing costume who announces that she is "Capitalism." Soon a 30-foot-long white-and-green-colored dragon winds its way through the gasping audience. "The Communists are coming--Help! Help!" shriek the onstage characters as they watch the approaching dragon. A puppet king, Vittorio Emanuele, pushes forward the shapely brunette in the bathing costume. "Only you, sweet Capitalism, can save us," he says. The dragon growls ferociously at the brunette and starts to wind itself around her body. She moves seductively within its coils, rubbing her breasts against its body. Instead of crushing her, the dragon succumbs to her charms.

The workers behead the huge "Fascist" puppet and plan a democratic Italy. But the new tyranny becomes the assembly line, about which Fo raises a characteristically Italian plaint: "Women who work on the assembly line are forced to make 40,000 body movements a day. As a result, 15% of them become sterile and 30% cripples. In some factories where men are subjected to continual movement and noise, 40% of the men become impotent."

Personal Revolution. The last act becomes participatory theater as actors and audience debate the significance of the play. Says one speaker from the stage: "Fellow workers, you must rise and fight the bosses. You are like the Communist dragon--seduced by the comfort that Capitalism offers you as a bribe to keep quiet. But refrigerators and TV sets won't solve your problems--only the revolution can give you the strength and human dignity denied the working class so long." In the village of Vignola, the audience was so aroused by this argument that a group called for flags and guns to march on the nearby factory and take it over. The march did not take place. As one worker says to another in Grand Pantomime: "We can't kill the boss. After all, he has a mamma like us all and he pays for our local football team."

Fo has turned his back on a footlight fame that shines far beyond Italy. Son of a recently retired railroad worker, Fo was an enthusiastic amateur actor in his youth, appearing in student plays while studying architecture in Milan. At 24 he worked up a one-man act reciting monologues. His first nationwide success was a three-act tragi-comedy that examined the making of a hero, coming to the conclusion that the hero is only a creation of the "big boss," who used him to keep the workers distracted while the boss exploited them. His greatest hit, written in 1967, is set in a circus in the U.S., where the clowns die and go to an American heaven to find a paradise packed with consumer goods.

Fo is Italy's most renowned contemporary playwright, and while he is little known in the U.S., 45 European theaters have produced his works in the past year alone, including performances in Germany, England, France and most of the Iron Curtain countries. Until recently, he and his blonde actress-wife Franca Rame could command combined annual earnings of $120,000. While Fo's plays still garner respectable royalties, he settles for $11.20 per diem in Grand Pantomime, which comes close to the average ticket price for a Broadway musical.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.