Left-Wing Duck Soup

By LANCE MORROW

ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST by Dario Fo

For nearly two decades, Dario Fo has been one of Italy's, and Europe's, best-known satirists and actors. Americans have heard little of him, for good reason. Fo and his wife, the actress Franca Rame, were about to embark on an American tour in 1980, when the U.S. State Department banged the door shut. State invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act in order to protect the country from Fo's leftist opinions.

(The playwright is confusing in his choice of enemies: in 1970 the Italian Communist Party stopped supporting him because he ridiculed it--as he did such other institutions as the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Democrats and the CIA.) The playwright himself was stopped at the golden door, but his ideas, the quintessential and presumably most dangerous part of him, were free, theoretically, to sail in and raise hell up and down the American mind, waving torches, screaming anarchy. Somehow they do not seem that incendiary. Fo's creations sometimes look like Bertolt Brecht being done by the Marx Brothers. The anarchism savors of Duck Soup.

Both frolicsome and mordant, Fo's work is beginning to find American audiences. The Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., has undertaken one of his better-known leftist carnivals. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, written in 1970, is based on the actual case of an Italian anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli. Accused of terrorism, Pinelli is said to have jumped to his death from the fourth-floor window of Milan police headquarters. Fo suspected, and a later investigation proved, that Pinelli was pushed out the window by the police.

Furthermore, he was innocent of the terrorist act for which he had been arrested.

It does not sound like promising materal for comedy. But Fo has turned the event into fine and unlikely totalitarian farce. The central character is a sort of derelict loon who is a professional impostor. Fo took the part himself in the original Italian production, and, obviously, the Fool is essentially Fo. As wonderfully played at the Arena by Richard Bauer, the Fool behaves like Karl Marx masquerading as Dr. Hugo Hackenbush. He is what the Russians call a yurodivy, an elaborately disguised truth seeker, an anarchist-individualist working under deep cover.

Fool-Fo, impersonating by turns a police inspector, a high-court judge and a bishop, leads the local police through what is supposedly an official investigation of the anarchist's death. They (Tom Hewitt as the captain, Michael Jeter as the sergeant, Joe Palmieri as an inspector, Raymond Serra as the police chief) are basically cartoons of goons, the Four Stooges horsing around in the basement of the Lubyanka. Fo's jokes sometimes foozle aimlessly about the room like a balloon that jets on its own escaping air. An effort to give an essentially Italian product some American flavor has produced a dozen badly aimed, almost incompetent anti-Reagan cracks.

In its deeper reaches, Fo's manic comedy is a splendid treatise on the mentality and mechanics of official lying. The play would have had hilarious pertinence if it had played Washington during the last months of the Nixon Administration. But Fo is examining something more sinister than Watergate ever was. Fo is thinking of a dark, sanctioned thuggery--the kind that kills--and of an endless manipulation of the record, the facts of the past dissolving and reforming themselves into new shapes, like that cloud that Hamlet and Polonius discussed. Certain psychological and moral circumstances, Fo knows, bring about an irrevocable extinction of the truth. --By Lance Morrow