Bread and circus

Trinity Rep goes with the Fo

by Carolyn Clay

WE WON'T PAY! WE WON'T PAY! By Dario Fo. North American version by R.G. Davis. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Set design by David Jenkins. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Pat Collins. With Phyllis Kay, Janice Duclos, William Damkoehler, Fred Sullivan Jr., Dan Welch, and musicians Kevin Fallon, Rachel Maloney, and Chris Turner. At Trinity Repertory Company, through May 16.

In We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Lucy and Ethel hold up a grocery store -- except that the Ricardos and the Mertzes are Italian, the episode goes on for two and a half hours, and the writer of the teleplay is Marxist farceur and Nobel laureate Dario Fo. To my mind a more gifted clown than dramatist, Fo was honored by the Swedish Academy for his fusions of commedia dell'arte and agitprop, of which the 1970 Accidental Death of an Anarchist is probably the best-known, though the 1974 We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! is more often exported. Written at a time of spiraling inflation in Italy, the Milan-set play is part pratfall, part rallying call -- though the two are not perfectly integrated. The careering farce sometimes slows to idle so that the greed and exploitation of "the bosses" can be addressed or Fo can go off on a tangent about, say, the misuse of sex in advertising. And the play's politics are as broadside as its "commie-dy." Still, if Trinity Rep is no hot plate of Milanese Maoists, it is one roiling cauldron of comic energy. And the troupe gives We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! a run for its money.

Director Amanda Dehnert and company do not relocate the play to Federal Hill (as another Providence troupe did a few years ago) -- though they are utilizing a blunt, profanity-shot "North American version" by San Francisco Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis. The show is performed as if it were entertainment at an Italian street festival, its makeshift set installed between cappuccino-and-biscotti bars (dispensing drinks and snacks at intermission), before cut-outs of apartment buildings, the air space criss-crossed with clothes lines bearing socks, underwear, and Italian flags. Dominating the playing space is a two-story, neon-limned cut-out of Pope Paul with a door through his robes. "Is that big enough-a pope or what?" a player identifying himself as Sal Minella asks the audience.

The plot is set in motion when enterprising housewife and factory worker Antonia bursts into her apartment, accompanied by neighbor Margherita and multiple sacks of hot groceries. There has been an insurrection at the local supermarket, the shoppers protesting impossibly high prices by setting their own (including five-finger discount). "It was like a party," Antonia exults, because of the "solidarity."

Trouble is, the ladies need to hide their stash not only from the local constabulary (who do indeed conduct a house-to-house search for the liberated foodstuffs) but from Antonia's husband, Giovanni, a strait-laced assembly-line worker put off by "extremists." Giovanni shows up, followed by Margherita's Luigi, and one lie leads to another -- as well as to a lot of silliness involving false pregnancies and people eating pet food. Things are further complicated by look-alike policemen, one an improbably Irish revolutionary (cops are workers too), the other a mad-Fascist carabiniere with a monocle and an Inspector Javert complex. A lot of the banter between and about the sexes seems dated. Some of the farce is more strained than boffo. And the jabs at capitalist and religious establishments are so far from incendiary that it's hard to believe that for some years Fo was denied a visa by the US State Department on political grounds. (The lampoons and lazzi of Fo's own one-man show, the brilliant Mistero Buffo, are far more provocative; when it aired on Italian television in 1977, the Vatican labeled it "the most blasphemous spectacle in television history.")

The Trinity cast, the crew (who make a few appearances, headsets and all), and a trio of musicians (who also impersonate police vans and ambulances) get into the spirit of the enterprise, though. So does the audience, which at one point is enjoined to hand down bags of smuggled flour and sugar from the back of the theater to the stage. I had a little trouble with the Italian stereotyping, complete with modified accents, bad clothes, and "Mambo Italiano." But for all that, the actors render their brassy, stereotypical characters with heart. And the physical comedy is pulled off, for the most part, with panache. At one point, Fred Sullivan Jr., hilariously over-the-top as the good cop/bad cop (among other roles), has to skittle not only between parts but between hanging in a closet as the ostensibly dead carabiniere and popping out of manholes as a ghoulish, bespectacled fish of an undertaker. Janice Duclos doesn't get to do that, but sometimes, when parked at the center of the craziness like the eye of a hurricane, she steals the show with her looks of sheer panic. For my money, We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! is more belabored than uproarious. But cast and spectators, mixing it up like a can of nuts, seem to have fun. And Fo's heart is in the right left place.