March 12, 2020 25
Fo changed the script almost daily to
include material from the trial, much of
it as grotesque and surreal as his origi-
nal imaginings. The play led to forty
legal actions against him.
It is with a sense of wonder that one
follows Farrell’s detailed account of
these years—wonder that Fo and Rame
survived, wonder that they survived as
a couple. Fo was a whirlwind of creativ-
ity throwing up turbulence all around.
Their house was set on fire. Franca
was abducted and raped by extremist
thugs hired, as it later turned out, by
the police. The couple went on produc-
ing plays in which they pretended to
spray machine-gun fire at the audience
or had actors dressed as police burst
into the theater and announce that ev-
eryone was under arrest. They visited
Mao’s China and declared it the per-
fect society. For years they occupied an
abandoned building in central Milan,
turning it into a theater and left-wing
community. Shown on public television
in 1977, Mistero buffo provoked fierce
national controversy.
Dario had endless affairs with young
actresses. Franca announced she was
leaving him in a live TV interview. He
wrote letters of apology and reconcili-
ation that reached her when they were
published in a newspaper. It was as if a
life were not real if it didn’t happen in
public. He began to concede her impor-
tance and coauthorship of their work.
She began to perform monologues of
her own on feminist issues. All this
while a constant stream of shows was
produced, often on controversial ques-
tions—Palestine, Chile, drug dealing—
about which Fo knew very little. “Years
lived at high speed,” Rame later ob-
served. She died in 2013, and Fo in 2016.
What one is invited to consider here
is the notion of artists whose work mat-
tered supremely at the moment and in
the place it was first performed, and
depended largely on the physical pres-
ence of the artists themselves. Direc-
tors around the world have produced
Fo’s work; the British version of Acci-
dental Death of an Anarchist is a rare
example of successful adaptation. But
the sheer electricity and brazen provo-
cation of Fo’s original performance is
hard to recover, even in Italy. Fo, Far rell
claims, “was the least autobiographi-
cal of writers.” But arguably the plays
themselves, his performance of them,
were the life, and the marriage. The
stage settings were his. He designed and
often painted the props. He wrote the
songs. He performed himself, directed
himself. Rame advised, assisted, edited.
Browsing the scores of videos avail-
able online, it’s hard not to feel that Fo
is happiest with an adoring audience of
young people cross-legged on the floor
all around while he performs the mon-
strous Boniface puffing himself up in
papal splendor. But however enthusi-
astic the audience might be about the
moral message behind the material, it
does not seem that any transformative
anger is aroused, or any compassion
for the pope’s victims, nailed by their
tongues to church doors. One is simply
agog at the extraordinary virtuosity
that is Dario Fo. QEPIC RAIN
Ten hours of continuousness, the audio
promises, looped by a stranger
who’s enhanced the thunder, embedded trickles
from pine needles as from syringes,assembled clouds, vast and digital,
to perform his soundtrack, so that a million amygdalae
can relax together, the frazzled city centers
resetting to Homo sapiens smoothnessand the far-flung, isolated bedrooms
begin filling with rain in the REM stage, and the delta
waves resemble the ones at sea
after catastrophe,a civilization’s treasures floating
unencumbered: an Apollonian vase’s athlete
submerged, the landscapes
and self-portraits jostling like rafts over falls,the chiaroscuro and sfumato, impasto
passages tumbling through foam. This is the brain
on benzos and earphones, frictionless
and plugged in, miraculously,to the sea floor’s fiber optics, those tubes sometimes
touched in the gloomy gelatin by
a sucker, then withdrawn, of one who cradles
itself to sleep in all of its arms.—Paula BohinceThis is one of Oscar Mandel’s 47 “Gobble-Up Stories”, which together with the
extraordinary yarns “Chi Po and the Sorcerer” and “The History of Sigismund,
Prince of Poland”, make up his Otherwise Fables. 270 pages, Prospect Park Books,
publishers of the companion Otherwise Poems and the author’s polyphonic
Last Pages (essays, a play, novellas, poems).A Conversation Between a Bulldozer and a Mouse
A large bulldozer was tearing up a field in which a family
of mice had made their nest. As the bulldozer carved its
way nearer and nearer to their home, the mice could
hear the groans of wounded bitterweeds and the gasps
of slain beetles rising from all sides of the field. “What
shall we do?” the miceling were crying, but their parents
only stared and trembled as the terrible jaws gnashed
the earth. At last the father mouse leaped forward and
ran up to the machine, which he addressed as follows:
“Lord Bulldozer, spare my little family; we are poor but
honest mice that have lived in this useless lot for many years without disturbing
the peace.” “And what makes you think that I have come to disturb the peace?”
replied the bulldozer. “Well–” said the mouse. “Nonsense,” the bulldozer
retorted; “you are thoroughly mistaken. I am leveling the ground for an eighty-
five-story apartment house as a special favor to you mice.” “As a special favor
to us mice?” “Yes, sir. You have been disgracefully happy in a sordid nest with an
occasional dandelion in your gullet; but after I have finished my work, you will
take your pick of five dozen rooms, each one overflowing with bread and cheese,
potatoes, and lamb chops. The nation of mice will thrive; you will publish odes
to me.” “I am very glad that the nation of mice will thrive,” said the mouse, “but
what about us?” “Who is us?” “Us, me, my woman, and my two miceling!” “I
don’t know us, my and me,” said the bulldozer, “I deal in principles.” The mouse
ran back to his family, and said as cheerfully as he could: “The bulldozer brought
me good news: he is growing an apartment house here especially for the nation
of mice, and we are going to live in whipped cream to the end of time.” But be-
fore the mother could make a comment (and that was a pity, because she was a
sensible beast), a ton of earth fell on top of them and the bulldozer churned on.Let you and me be more careful than these mice, and when we see progress
coming our way, jump aside in time.