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  • The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame
  • Juliet Guzzetta (bio)

Once a year I teach an intermediate Italian language course at my large state university in the Midwest.1 I follow a textbook that is organized around cultural themes, and through these, the authors introduce new vocabulary and grammar. When I was editing my syllabus for the fall of 2016, I had not noticed that the beginning of the fourth chapter, the one on politics (with the sophisticated title Il valore delle idee [The Value of Ideas]), would coincide with the most contentious presidential election of my lifetime. On Monday, November 7, 2016, after working our way through a few introductory ideas, I invited the students to converse in small groups using a conversation section in the textbook that I often turn to for how it incorporates new vocabulary. The atmosphere in the room suddenly grew tense as the questions invited my students to ponder, "Is there a political party to which you feel close? Did you vote in the last election? Is there a politician in particular that you admire?"2 As I walked around the room to different groups, I noticed that many students were awkwardly avoiding responding. Finally, the students began to speak up—to me, in English. "These are awfully personal." Another student: "This isn't a political science class."

At that point, I guided the conversation to come together as a whole class and I briefly defended these questions as a cultural example of the fundamental importance of civic engagement. "In Italy," I told them, "politics is for everyone, not just students of political science," ending with my joke, "so when you're in Italy and go to il bar to have your morning cappuccino, be prepared to talk about two topics: politics and soccer." That day, my students helped me realize that there was something far more valuable to the conversation questions than [End Page 257] practicing spoken Italian with new vocabulary. Those questions speak to a fundamental Italian principle: no matter the political affiliation, everyone has the potential, the right, and even the responsibility to engage in political discourse, even if they are not politicians. One hears the echoes of Antonio Gramsci's magnanimous declaration that everyone is an intellectual, even if not by profession.

It was this idea, among others, that Dario Fo (1926–2016), the 1997 Nobel laureate for literature, and Franca Rame (1929–2013), also a writer, actor, producer, and politician but most known as Fo's partner in life and art, internalized and embraced as a guide for their theatrical practice. Fo, who both the public and even critics often solely credit for the work that he and Rame created collaboratively, for decades held the distinction of having been the most performed living playwright in the world from the early 1960s until his death in 2016.3 Literary scholar Joseph Farrell points out, however, that in fact it is the works that are jointly signed with Fo and Rame as coauthors that are most frequently staged.4 From Chile to Romania, South Africa to China, Fo's admirers have hailed him as a champion for the people who, in a revised Brechtian mode, aims to educate as much as entertain. Fo and Rame's poetics, both in their solo shows and with larger casts, is fundamentally dialectical as it melds the tradition of the medieval giullare, a figure that combines clowning and wisdom like the English court jester, with a Gramscian orator who contemplates current events from the perspective of a revised Marxist philosophy. Most of their theatre, including the well-traveled plays such as Mistero buffo (Comic Mystery, 1969), The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), and Can't Pay, Won't Pay (1974), directly aims not only at questioning the conditions of the working class and challenging then-current political matters but also at inspiring their audiences to question and actively challenge the authority in their lives. Their plays attempt to demonstrate how ordinary people have been persecuted by those in power for centuries, and, even more importantly, they aim to rectify this mistreatment by providing a space wherein their audiences can voice opinions and...

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