I’d heard of Dario Fo (1926– ), a Nobel Prize winner, but I’d never read anything by him or seen any of his plays until I went to see Accidental Death of an Anarchist, currently running at the Vortex Theater (Thursdays through Sundays at 8pm until the end of this month). The play, Fo’s take on actual events that happened in Milan, Italy in the winter of 1969, should resonate with present-day Americans.
In December of 1969 terrorists bombed the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 and wounding 100. The far-right group Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) immediately began distributing leaflets condemning socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. Initially the public and police believed the bombing to be the work of anarchists. Fearing a leftist insurgency, over 4,000 people were arrested in the wake of the bombing.
One of those arrested was Guiseppe Pinelli, a railway worker and pacifist anarchist. Pinelli’s four-day interrogation culminated in a confession before he “accidentally” fell out of the fourth-story window of police headquarters, where his body was found by a journalist. Police insisted that the fall was accidental. A judge agreed, and the case was shut. Many demonstrations, press investigations, and articles followed over the next three years, exposing various inconsistencies in the police’s version of events, eventually resulting in the police chief being convicted of manslaughter.
What’s more, the bombing had not been the work of anarchists at all, but rather the result of a plot involving far-right elements in the Italian security services and the fascist terrorist organization Ordine Nuovo.
But Fo’s play doesn’t focus on the aftermath of the incident so much as make fun of the inadequate, prevaricating police and their inconsistent versions of the truth.
Employing elements of slapstick farce and commedia dell’arte, a type of improvised comedy popular in Italian theaters in the 16th–18th centuries based on stock characters, Fo sends a nameless maniac into the police station, posing as a judge who’s come to reopen the investigation into the anarchist’s accidental death. Like a puppet-master with his puppets, the madman practices dubious tactics used by the police to gain often-false confessions, tricking the police into contradicting their official story, making fools of them in the process and eventually exposing them to a journalist who’d come to the station for an interview with the commissioner.
I knew I was in for something out of the ordinary when I heard vintage Looney Tunes scores careening through the speakers as I found my way to my seat. Since I’d never seen a farce before, I was surprised (in a good way) by the performers’ adroit physical comedy and the way they delivered the over-the-top, slapstick-style jokes. The slapstick is tempered, however, by the way the play piles irony upon irony, not the least of which being that the madman is the most sane of all the characters.
Lorella Loftus, the play’s director and a devotee of Dario Fo, had never directed a farce before and found herself facing the issue of how far to take it. Once you see the play, it’s obvious she took it as far as she possibly could. In addition to the Looney Tunes intermission music, all of the actors, with the exception of the madman, have their faces painted in sinister, clown-like ways that at once suggest their idiocy and the dark realities that stem from their deception.
In making her decision, Loftus had to look no further than Fo’s life.
“It’s a style of theater that’s based on storytelling,” explains Loftus. “I mean, look at Shakespeare and his traveling players. Dario Fo is in that tradition of traveling theater and commedia dell’arte. And though he’s getting on a bit now [in age], he wrote this play when he was in his forties. And they toured with this production and others to places like factories, trials, strikes, places of social unrest. He was right at the heart of it all performing the function that a band of players would have in Elizabethan England, getting things stirred up, starting debate, and taking pot-shots at people in power. You know, these days,” Loftus continues, “we think of Shakespeare as a highfaluting thing, but in his day he was creating theater for the people. And that’s what Dario Fo does — he makes theater for the people. I think he would have wanted to make the cops look like real idiots, and that’s how we play it out. Though I was a bit nervous about it at first.”
You’d have to agree with Loftus, considering that in 1975 Fo’s wife, an Italian actress named Franca Rame, was abducted and brutally gang-raped by neo-fascists, an order (it was ruled 25 years after the fact by an investigating magistrate) sent down from then-senior police officers, now dead, who disliked the couple’s disdain for governmental authority. This act of violence did nothing to quell the couple’s outspoken ways.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this play is that the company of players gets to choose how the play ends, a device used often by Fo to keep the plays relevant to the time and context in which they are played. I think they pull it off very well; I attribute this to the way the actors gel with one another, an observation corroborated by Loftus.
“This has been a great cast. Being a director in charge of everything, you have to manage people,” explains Loftus. “And that can sometimes get in the way of the artistic product, but not in this effort — this one has been a very collaborative effort. I think we’ve incorporated most suggestions from the cast, and the artistic product is better off for it.”
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