 So welcome, everybody, to the Martin Segal Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center of CUNY. My name is Frank Hatch, I'm the director of programs at the director of the Segal Center. And today is a very special day for us, and that's in the bigger sense also for the world of theater. Tonight, we are remembering one of the giants of the global theater of world theater. It is the Italian actor, comedian, writer, director, Edario Krohl, and, is it on? Yes? Yes, so again, so welcome to the Martin Segal Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center of CUNY. This is what Bob Bruce, who is listening in, so he has to hear what I say just, as I said before, Bob Bruce, he couldn't join us tonight to do some things. They didn't go as we planned, but he is live with us on Skype and he will talk with us. Again, Bob was the one who brought a Dario Faux over here in a very lengthy process, actually, as we learned from the film. I think it took them two years to get him here. And we do come together tonight to celebrate one of our own giant in the field of theater, Dario Faux, who was truly a role model. He was an activist, an actor, a director. He was a true human being, as we said, and he carried on a thousand-year-old tradition of the storytelling at the Hakavati, as they say in the Arab theater, but something that is as ancient as mankind, and most probably when the first people came up to give a funeral to someone, as some said, this is how the culture started. I'm sure someone afterwards made a little joke and told the story of the person. So this is the very, very beginning and Faux, as we also learned and heard, he is a bridge between the past and the present, and his innovations in theater, his reinterpretation of Brecht's idea of political theater, his rediscovery of the world of the comedia and the zany and not in a commercial, cheap entertainment sense, but as a true uttering of a human existence is unique and brought him success all around the world. As we know, he became the Nobel Prize. Very few writers ever got the Nobel Prize in writing, and it was the O'Neill or I think Pirandello, and it was the Alfred Jellinack, and of course then also a Dario Faux, and it was the most performed playwright at this time around the globe, and this just gives us an idea of his special way to reach out to audiences, his idea of popular theater and what it should be, and also his connection to spiritual thinking or what a church should be, a church as a theater, he took us through that tour of a church in the second documentary, the first documentary we saw. I would like to make also to thank the Italian Cultural Institute for supporting us, Fabio, and George Jofain Stratton, and Umanism Valeria, who supported us here and everybody who was involved, and with us tonight, we have Joe Crifasi and a real Italian-American actor who actually performed Dario Faux on Broadway, we will talk a bit about later, and he prepared for us excerpts from some of the faux plays, and in between, I hope it all works out, the Skype gods are friendly towards us, we will speak with Bob Rusyn who's still in Florida and couldn't come back in time, so maybe we start with the very, very first work, and it's a play that's not as well known, it's the discovery of America, John Pardon, and it's a play Dario Faux wrote and researched, and this was a piece we thought is a good way to discover in the very beginning, so Joe. Johann Padang is a character we also find in the Comedia dell'arte, called by other names, Giovanni Gianni, this Johann is a kind of Rusante, more precisely, a Gianni, the prototype of the Mask of Alachino, who, as we will see, was born in the valleys of Brescia and Bergamo and finds himself literally propelled to the Indies where he's engaged on a ship that is a part of Columbus' fourth expedition. Now, to tell you the truth, I had not thought of writing this text, let alone encountering a character of such complexity until the summer of 1991 when I was invited to Spain, Seville, to be exact, with Franca, to make a presentation for a theater full of critics, theater writers, actors, and cultural experts about the structure of Isabella, three tall ships, and a con man. The play I was supposed to present that spring in 1992 at the exposition in honor of Christopher Columbus. It was a play that I had suggested with Franca about 29 years earlier in 1963 for the opening of the theatrical season at the Odeon in Milan. At its debut and for the duration of the tour, the play aroused scandals, consensus, sensation, and polemics, especially on the part of reactionaries. Today, the behavior of theater audiences has changed a great deal, though. People participate with tranquility, with serenity, sitting in their chairs without living the situation. They're listening as passive, digestive, like television. When I returned to Italy, I threw myself into researching texts about the discovery of the Americas, written by protagonists who were almost unknown. That was how I discovered this account, practically a ship's journal of a sailor who had the slightly grotesque name of Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca, moon, caviche. Okay, his parapetetic adventures seemed to be almost exact duplicates of those that I had recounted in Seville. And I found another autobiographical chronicle very similar to that of Cabeza de Vaca, written by Hans Staten, a German sailor who had also found himself in the Indies and lived the life of Robinson Crusoe. He was imprisoned by Indians who fed him, harassed him, fattened him up with the intention of leaving him. Researching adventures narrated by sailors of the lower ranks, I also came across Sigala, a genuine who had sailed with Columbus and arrived in Florida and became the head of a tribe of Machuco Indians. I also met a sailor from Palos, Gonzalo Guerriero, who deserted from the expedition of Tristan de Cabaco and ended up as a prisoner of the Incas who after condemning him to death had second thoughts and elected him their sacred wizard. And finally I discovered the tales of Michela de Cuneo who was the right-hand man and confident of Columbus. This sailor was an unbiased witness to the events that were terrified, especially given the pitiless realism with which they were expressed in these journals. What struck me most about de Cuneo's account was the invention of a language that availed itself of all the idioms of romance languages, a kind of lexical pastiche used at the time by all the sailors of the Mediterranean, a mixture of numerous languages and dialects, Lombardy and Venetian, Catalani and Castilian, Provençal, Portuguese, and also a little Arabic, just for the fun of it. And for spice, what are you gonna say? I said to myself, this is my man. I'll call him Johann Padan and I'll make him speak this gramolat of the seaports. Well, naturally the lexically unbiased spectators gifted with the exceptional imaginations will have the advantage of understanding the punchlines even before I finish speaking them. The rest of you, the normal ones will laugh later at the end of the wave. Basta. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then I think he starts on his voyage from Seville and crosses the ocean and comes to Merica and it's an interesting text. But maybe Mike and Brad, let's see if our line to Florida is working. So here he is. So Bob, thank you so much for joining us. I think he has to press the mute button. We need to hear you. Let's see. Is it on? We still don't hear. We don't have a sound. And this is like on CNN when they say how close are you and, yeah. That's the thing. Okay, wonderful. So Bob, we can- Okay, all right. So thank you for joining us tonight. It's my great pleasure and please my apologies to the audience. I have a flu and I didn't want to contaminate all of you except for the last of the night. So I'll be giving you another flu. Wonderful. Also, I sent my salutations to German Fosse who is probably an actor as close to pro as there is in the United States. So do I. And very gratified to claim as a former student Yale School of Drawing. And my thanks to Frank for inviting me tonight. Yeah, so thank you. Thank you so much, Bob. Bob, you are known and not only, you know, as the founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, the ART in Boston, but also because of your book, The Theater of Revolt. Would you include Dario Foe as one of the main chapters looking now on his work? This position that the political revolt per se without some quality of computation is not true theater. And, you know, when Dario went off, simply as a polemicist, it was not true theater, but he always did have the alternating capacity to complicate and he complicated through comedy. So I would say he's very much a part of the revolt, yes. Yes, thank you. So how did you discover him first? When did you hear of him? That's interesting. I think I saw a film, if I'm not mistaken, I was in the 90s that involved him and Franca and I was so taken with the extraordinary genius, both of them, writing them to the United States, where they performed at the American Repertory Theater in 2001 as a matter of fact, and coincidentally during the time of the attack on the World Trade Center. So he actually stopped a few performances, the difference to that terrible event. Yeah, thank you. What draws you to him? What do you think makes him so unique? He's not unique because he's in a great tradition of the Giuliani, the low clouds, the boons of the United Theater that costs comedian, and when you have with W. C. Niels, but he's unique in his own persona, that of the, you know, of the buffoon, who is also the wise man. He's his old socket, he's his, you know, socket is, one set, the wisest man is the one who knows he's a fool, and that is the aerial color. Yeah. I think you did two or three folk shows in Boston. Which were they? Why did you select them? Partly selected, we selected them together. One was John Fettwa, by the company that you all thought you were. Yeah. John Tuttiwain. The discovery of America's? At the discovery of America, yes. The other was the show he did with Franca. We won't pay, we won't pay, as we called it, I see as now called it. We won't pay. I can't pay, but we always call it, we won't pay, we won't pay, with the more literal US legislation that's titled, Extremely Well. So, did he had a presence on campus when he came? Did he interact with students, faculty, people from Cambridge? He did give a few question and answer sessions, which were translated, his English was not that strong, and he was, as then, extremely informative and extremely amusing. I think when Faux-Dario Faux was a young actor, he was at the Piccolo Theater with Streler. He actually was, if I remember right, in the same cast, as a same group as Marcelo Mastroiani, and Matt Brecht, and who he also quotes and influenced him. Do you, where do you see him in the kind of lineage of Brecht, and what did he change, or what did he make different, and how successful was it? How successful was he? As a Brecht, yeah. Well, you know, he wasn't essentially a literary figure, so I don't think he could put him in the same category as Brecht. You put him in the same genre, certainly, as a plethora of commentary. Oh, but he was more of a performer than he was a writer. And... Well, he got the Nobel Prize. Yes, he did, but he was certainly one of the first, if not the first actual performers to get that prize. Later Bob Dylan got it, but I think Dario was the first. Yeah, I think that if you look at the accidental death of the anarchist, you know, it is very much in that idea of Brecht's street theater, a street scene to show what happened, and I think he went a bit beyond the didactic fables. He really introduced the laughter and the popular theater that perhaps Brecht was looking for, but not always was able to create. I think, Bob, we have a little mic problem. His hand is over the microphone. What? His hand is over the microphone. He's covering his own microphone. Yeah. Can we, Bob, can you hear us? I think maybe we try to work that out and in good improvisational limits we go. Perhaps we go to the second piece and we ask Joe to... Yeah. Do I have to perform with Bob staring at me over my shoulder? No, we're gonna put it down and here we go. And now we come to a play as Joe said. What's my teacher, you know? Joe said, please announce this piece now as this is about lobbyists. I don't know what to say. This is from Mistero Bufo, a segment. In Umbria, the term nailer refers to the man who nails Christ to the cross during the performance of the lords. In the Poe Valley, they use the term spiker or crucifer and the passion play performed in the dialect of that region which we will now present to you. This year in Pisa, you can see an exhibition of the statues from the 12th and 13th centuries depicting the lifestyle saints, lifestyle saints reacting around the cross, you know, as they would, you know? Originally these painted statues were used in the passion plays. The crucified Christ was represented with articulated arms and wrists and legs so that the descent from the cross could be done in a way that it made Jesus seem real. Fun, huh? I'll be in my dress, what can I say? The technique used by the nailers to stretch out and hoist Jesus onto the cross is described with surprising almost obsessive precision. One gets the impression that in those times the act of nailing people on crosses was very well known and even fashionable. Yes, on the other hand, we know that this horrendous form of execution continued to be practiced until the eighth and ninth centuries. This is the reason why up to that day in the frescoes and miniatures that depict the life of Christ, the moment of the crucifixion is inexorably censored. One cannot be permitted to get down on one's knees and pray to a man, even if he's divine, condemned to a cross and then leave the church to find a real one hoisted on a similar crucifix. So what follows is a piece about the drama under the cross presented by a fool as the absolute protagonist. This text requires the presence of a solo performer acting out all the roles except Christ. The figure of Christ is created with a polychrome wooden statue which has moving parts. It is identical to the one used in the Tuscan and Umbrian mystery plays from the 10th to the 13th centuries of which several examples are extant. So, the guilare, the fool is squatting at a card game. Bufa, king, goblets, oh, woman on a horse, I lose, oh. Again, here we go, come on. You, one, two, three, go, boom. What, the wagon, two, good, what, two brothers, five of staff, ha ha, the emperor, I love, paying, I'm paying, all right, here, take your money. Here, I haven't won a thing. Hey listen, excuse me, okay? Now stay here, wait, wait for me, I'll be right back. I'm sorry, but I know it's not good manners to go around busting the blessed balls of somebody who's already suffering on the cross. Nailed to it even, but I come to ask you if you could do me a little favor. Jesus, I'm someone who has never won a game, not a single round, because I'm always surrounded by these miscreant charlatans who cheat at the game like junk dealers selling gold-colored, gold-covered lead. They don't play fair with their cards, Jesus. You know, you know it, you see it, right? Right, you do see it, right? Hey, Jesus, I'm here. Where are you looking over there? Jesus, look, be good to me, huh? Be kind to me, give me the wondrous pleasure of letting me win at least once, okay? Come on, Jesus, look, give me a sign, all right? Yeah, it's a little difficult to do with your hands now, but you know, your eyes blink your eyes, okay? Good, good. Did you blink, yes, huh? Do it again, huh? You blinked, you blinked. Oh, dear man, I could come up there and give you a hug. You're really gonna make me win, right? Right, huh? Don't joke around with me, come on, or I'll blaspheme against you. Swear on your father that you told me so. You know, it would be a lousy thing to do, you know, for somebody up on the cross to play a trick on me just before dropping dead. It would be a bad joke. All right, I'm gonna go play, Jesus. Okay, listen up, I'm coming back to the game here. Let's go, come on, ready? Mm, mm, you, okay, boom. Oh, Bufa, soldier with the joke. Oh, horse over the queen, that's mine. Ha, ha, ha, ha, yeah. Okay, what do you have, huh? You got the moon, he's got the sorcerers, I got the devil. That's mine, ha, ha, ha. Okay, let's start again, here we go. Okay, queen of virgins, king of staffs, with the gold, the earthquake, and the fat head, that's mine, ha, ha. I'm going to take it easy. Oh, five in a row for me, huh? Yeah, that's pretty good. What, what, you're not playing anymore? Come on, you don't have any more money? Well, I'll give you some money. Yeah, yeah, I got some silver, you know? Hey, take it, take it, take it, silver. No, I didn't steal it. They were judices, and he threw them at the thorns. Yeah, I got scratched all over, picking them up here. Take it, you can have them since the Judas hung himself over there, you know? Come on, of course I want something from you, exchange, I think I'm crazy. Yeah, let's make a deal. You, you give him to me, okay? Yeah, the permission to take him down and carry him away with me. Yes, Jesus Christ, for me, okay? No, not dead, no, not dead, you keep the dead. I want him still alive, like he is now. He's breathing, come on, look. You lead him for me, okay? You're not worried, I know very well if the centurion shows up and discovers an empty cross, he'll clobber you one by one, a nail here, a nail there, one foot over the other, boom, boom, boom, I know, I know. But I'm proposing that we don't leave the cross empty. Put somebody up there in his place. Yeah, Judas, for example, get him down from the fig tree he's hanging from. Come on, go get him, carry him here, stick him up with the big four nails. Nobody'll notice the switch. Everybody looks the same on the cross, you know? They're all turning to poor Christ. Come on, is the deal done? Go, okay, no, I'll take care of Christ. No, I'll take care of Christ by myself, okay? I'll get him down, okay, I'll use the ladder, here we go. Jesus, pull your arm in a bit, okay? I don't want to crush it, that's it, like that, okay? I'm coming, oh God, Jesus, you know? You never thought it would be a fool who would take you off the cross to save you, did it? This is great. You save mankind and a fool saves you, what a joke. All right, come on, I'm going to pull you off now. No, no, don't worry, I'm going to take you down like a beautiful bride, sweet and precious, carry you on my shoulders and then I'll take you on a boat that's there on the river, all the way to the far shore. And when we get there, oh how sweet it will be. There's a friend of mine over there, he's a shaman, okay, he has a lotion, a healing cream. And when he spreads it all over you, okay? You'll be running around like a happy leper. So take it easy, Jesus, okay, take it easy. What's the matter, why are you trembling? What, do you have a fever or something? Why are you shaking your head no? You don't want to go, you don't want to be nailed from here, why? Could you say that again? I didn't understand you, what, for the sacrifice? Because you want to die on the cross for the sacrifice to save mankind from their sins and in exchange for that, you have to die nailed to the cross. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, come back. And you say that I'm the fool. You're the fool, damn it. You and your whole family starting with God, the Father and the person and the big bird, the whole lot, you're all fools. What a great idea, what a great idea. Divine sacrifice, oh boy, yippee. Do you know what the priests are gonna do to you in your holy martyrdom? They're gonna picture it all in silver to mask your rotting flesh. They'll turn the drops of your blood into rubies and set it in gold and the beams of wood of the cross will be bejeweled, perfumed and carried around so that all the poor people and peasants will throw themselves down onto their knees before it in modification, flattened in devotion at the feet of the cross. And the priests that display it in procession will say, look, look, look what he sacrificed for you. Get on your knees and make sacrifices too. On your knees, you slug it. This is how the grand spectacle of your suffering will be used. I mean, some salvation that is, come on, arms open like a bird, your image will be slapped onto shields and implements of war. Your cross will also be painted in vivid colors on banners, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, it'll be on swords and that slash and killed in the name of God and butcher women and children and men and there'll be slaughter and massacres in the name of your sign. They'll use your sacrifice to perpetrate huge hoaxes and frauds. What, see that again? You don't care that they exploit your passion. Ha, ha, ha, what? It would be enough if one man clear-headed and blessed took your teachings and used it for a holy cause. And who would these worthy men be? Okay, give me some names, okay? Oh, Francis, good. Benedict, uh-huh. Dominic, sure. Nicholas, all right, all right. And after they've suffered every imaginable violence and indignity with the goal of comforting and rescuing from desperation the impoverished people who are downtrodden by the wealthy, how did they end up? Skewered alive and spit upon and then kicked around until they dropped dead. Jesus, what did you come on earth to do? Did you come to teach us all that we would all be on a cross from the day we were born? Did you come to teach us all how to live nailed to a cross? No! Excuse me, don't get angry. I'm sorry, I lost it. But we have no need for this lesson, okay? You should teach us another lesson. Set an example that I've only seen you demonstrate to Christians one time. It was the day you went into church and discovered the noble merchants, buying and selling and haggling over merchandise and you picked up your staff, picked it up and smacked, smacked, smacked. Christ, that's what you should have taught us. Just smack them, smack them, smack them, smack them. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thank you so, so very much. And yeah, this is, as you can see, it's truly a political theater. I don't know, Bob, can you hear us? Can we try and see if we can hear you? Perfect, Bob. We're gonna get back up. Can you hear us, Bob? There he is, there he is. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, fine. So, we all said, so I'm sorry about the little technical, difficult experience. No, Bob, it's only tactical. Yeah. Not tactical. Not tactical. So, the play we just, the excerpt we saw, but also some of the documentaries, it really clearly comes out that Poe is, as you also said, a political writer, a theater artist, a teatrista, as they would say in Argentina as we learned today. You, we have monitored theater, American theater, but also world theater for so many decades, over five or six. What is, what do you think about political theater now? Where is it going? Has it been influenced by Dario 4? Will there be, will it come back? There's judgments and tragedies of humankind, and the best way to be done is through comic satire, and that's form of politics. And Dario was among the best to do that, not the only one, but among the very best. So, it won't leave us as long as we are in the perfect world, and I'm afraid we'll always be in the perfect world. Who do you see working now in the tradition of a foe, or like reinventing, or like updating, you know, this, this, his work? Well, that's a good question, because you might do the movies and television, but God knows on TV there are some very brilliant comics and comic commentators are not exactly like Poe, but you know, someone like Bill Maher, who severs and absolutely interest rates the stupidities of the time, and I'm Chris, what is his name? I'm blanking with my old 90-year-old memory. Yeah, John Stuart. John Stuart, unquestionably, he was in the Poe tradition. He's a sharp assailor, rather than buffoons, and the buffoonery is very hard to count on, because it's a very special gift. And when Dario Four performed himself, right, in Cambridge when he came? Yes, he and Franca performed together. So, how was, you know, you said it was a success, but how did that really come across? He performed in his special mixture of his invented languages and in Italian English. Was it really a very clear message that he could send? Or was it a creative misunderstanding? Oh, there were subtitles. We had subtitles above the proscenium, so people knew what he was saying and what Franca was saying. It was around that time that, you know, Franca got raped in that really infamous event, which she was taken by a bunch of fascists into a band and raped, and she was never quite the same as a result. Yeah, it was... It wasn't a contest, it was a sad job. Yeah, it is another, another, incident of state violence against theater artists or against the people from the left. I think perhaps we go on now to the next play and to the excerpt of the accidental tourist, and I don't know if you can, can you hear there when Joe performs? Can you see him? Wonderful. So maybe there we go to the next one, and yeah, Bob, he wants you to give him some notes right after this, how he can improve. I will give my notes to Joe. Yes, how he can improve this. He never takes the notes. Yeah, so maybe we switch back to the black screen and this play, Joe asked me to say, this is all about black life matters and it's about police shootings. Connecting it to, yeah. Okay, next up my pages. Accidental death of an anarchist. An ordinary office in the central police headquarters in Milan. A drab and bureaucratic room dominated by a very large window, 39 cents. Good evening. I am Inspector Francesco Giovanni Battista Giancarlo Bertotto of the security police. This is my office on the first floor of our notorious headquarters in Milan. Notorious following a sordid little incident a few weeks ago when an anarchist under interrogation in a room similar a few floors above accidentally fell through the window. Although my colleagues claim quite reasonably that the incident was a suicide. The official verdict of the inquiry is that the death of the anarchist was accidental. Bit ambiguous, you see. So there's been some public outrage, accusations, demonstrations and so on flying around this building for weeks. Not the best atmosphere in which a decent nine to five plainclothes policeman like myself can do an honest inconspicuous day's work. Well, you know, I get all types in here. Hippies, junkies, pimps, arsonists, millennials. It's a sort of a clearinghouse, you might say. But excuse me. Next, I ought to warn you all that the author of this sick little play, Dario Fo, has the traditional irrational hatred of the police come into all narrow-minded left-wingers. And so I shall no doubt be the unwilling butt of endless anti-authoritarian jibes. Okay, so please bear with me, thank you. Ahem. Yeah, so let's see. This isn't the first time you've been up here for impersonation, is it? In all you've been arrested, let me see. Twice as a surgeon, three times as a bishop, army captain, tennis umpire, 11 arrests altogether. But I'd like to point out that I have never actually been convicted, inspector. I don't know how the hell you've been getting away with it, but this time, we'll have you. That's a promise. Oh, mouth-watering, isn't it? A nice clean record like mine just begging to be defiled. The cha... Anyway, the charges state that you falsely assumed the identity of a professor of psychiatry and former don of the University of Padua. That's fraud. Fraud, when convicted or committed by a sane man, yes. But I'm a lunatic, a certified psychotic. That proves it. I make sounds like nobody else. Okay. Well, look, here, read my medical report. I mean, committed 16 times, the same thing every time. Histrionic mania from the Latin histriones to act the part of. My hobby you see is the theater and my theater is the theater of reality. So my fellow artists must be real people unaware that they are acting in my productions, which is handy as you see. I've got no cash to pay them. Exactly. You swindled them. I've never swindled anyone. I applied for a grant in the Ministry of Culture, but I hadn't got the right connections. According to my notes, as a psychiatrist, you were charging your clients 200,000 lira a visit. Well, a reasonable fee for a man with my qualifications. What qualifications? 20 years of intensive training and 16 different loony bins under some of the best shrinks in the biz. Unlike your run of the mill man, I immersed myself in my studies. Okay, slept with them as well. When the beds ran out, slept head to toe in the cots. Make your own inquiries. I'm a bloody genius. Yes, a genius with a superb fee too. The fee is indispensable. It's an indispensable part of the treatment. If I didn't relieve those twits of the odd 200,000, I'd lose all credibility, right? I mean, any less they'd think I was no good, a beginner or something. I mean, even Freud, even Freud said a fat bill is the most effective panacea, especially for the doctor. This is your visiting card. Is it not? It is. Professor Antonio Rabia Psychiatrist, formerly lecturer at the University of Padua. Are you Antonio Rabia? Not exactly. What's that mean? I'm a professor. Oh, you are, huh? Yes, of design, decoration, and freehand drawing at the College of the Sacred Redeemer. I take evening classes. It says here, psychiatrist, after the comma? Yes. Before the full stop? Yes, exactly. Exactly what, Professor Antonio Rabia, comma, capital P, psychiatrist, full stop. I take it you're familiar with the rules of syntax and punctuation. Where's the fraud? Formerly lecturer at the University of Padua. True or false? After the formerly, what? Another comma. Can't you even read? I hadn't noticed it. Oh, you don't notice these things. Innocent people like me are thrown behind bars. You are mad. I know. What have these commas got to do with it? Nothing to someone with your rudimentary education evidently. Look, the punctuation changes the whole emphasis of the sentence, OK? After the comma, the reader, your good self, takes a short mental breath, thus changing the intentionality. You see? So, the sentence should read, Professor Antonio Rabia, comma, capital P, psychiatrist, full stop. OK? Formerly, comma, lecturer at the University of Padua. You see? Read correctly, only an asshole would swallow it. I'm an asshole then, am I? No, no, no, no. Your grammar is a bit retarded. That's all. I could give you a refresher course, cut rate, naturally. Let's begin by repeating all the subjective, objective and Italian pronouns, thus beginning with, io sono, tu sei, loro sono, lei. Come on, are you going to do this with me or not? Come on, don't be shy. Oh, io sono. May we, that's French, may we get on with this fucking statement? Fine. I'll type, qualified secretary, 45 words per minute. Shut up! Or shorthand, where do you keep the carbons around here? Look, get the cuffs on him. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, straight jacket or nothing for me, article 122 of the penal code, whoever in his capacity as a public official imposes non-clinical instruments of restraint upon a psychologically disturbed person in a manner reliable to provoke a crisis in the disturbance shall incur charges punishable, what, five to 15 years with? Thank you. Thank you so much, Joe. Maybe just join us also for a moment. Oh, sure. And the play, of course, goes on in the police station that the imposter pretends to be a judge. And he then investigates the case, which, of course, was not an accidental death. He was killed by the police. And it turned out that the bombs he was accused of having put into the bank and in other places were actually put there by the police in the very first place. Actually, a real case. Dario IV performed it for two years during the case actually developed. And they started updates every evening. And he said he had to fight about 40 lawsuits. And he became a very, very famous play, maybe next to We Won't Pay or I Won't Pay, the most successful one. Bob, if it's OK, maybe we ask Joe, you were in the Broadway production of this. Tell us a little bit, how did that happen, and who asked you, and how did it go? Well, first, I had done a play by Dario three years earlier. I think right after your departure, we did a play called About Face at the Yelp Rep and Andre Directive at Belgrader. And Dario was not allowed in the country at the time. I mean, everybody was trying because he was on a terrorist list, of course. And they couldn't get anywhere near the country. So a few years later, they had done this production down at the arena in DC. And it was translated by Richard Nelson, the playwright. And they brought it to Broadway. And Alexander Cohen, the old Broadway director, producer, wanted to put it on Broadway. So by that time, things were loosening up. And I know he really, among others, and it might have been you too, Bob. But he went to bat with a lot of people to get this silly terrorist list thing taken away. So we were rehearsing at the Bellasco Theater. And it was myself and Jonathan Price and Patty Lapone and Bill Irwin and Ray Sarah. And Alex walks in the back of the theater in the middle of a rehearsal. And he brings in Dario and Franca. They had been sprung, so to speak. Sprung to America, which for them would have been the opposite of being sprung, right? And it was great. The funny thing was, because they didn't speak any English. This is probably about 81. He didn't speak any English. But we did a couple of scenes for them. And Dario irrepressibly jumped up on the stage. And speaking Italian a mile a minute saying to Jonathan about you would do this by doing like that. And then when you get to this moment, you do that. So he was giving a whole lesson. But they were, we talked very, they talked very seriously a little bit about the initiative they had going in Italy, which was to get a lot of political people out of prison. And they were raising money to raise bail. So that night, just as a side note, that night, I said, I'd love to give you something, you know? So that night, I went to the, Alex had put them in the plaza hotel, which was so incongruous. And I went to the plaza hotel with my meager $50 check, and Franco received me. And it was so funny, she came walking, it was a suite. And it's just the idea that they were in this plaza suite. But she always looked glamorous as she was, you know, she had, she was a dish. Anyway, but that was kind of my experience with the hoping. And then Joe, you remember that he came to America 2001 to oversee the play we were doing, the one you were in, the John Ford and the Dan Black. No, I wasn't in it. No, it wasn't me. Oh, you weren't in that? No. Right. No. But he came that, we worked through some congressman, I forgot his name, and it managed to open doors. Well, he had, I'm talking about 20 years earlier. 20 years earlier. Yeah, 1981. Yeah. 1986, did you just look it up? Yeah. Yeah, but talk a bit about, I think this is the 86 production of the accidental death. Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah. So how did that happen? Yeah, how did that happen? Who asked you and how did it go? You know, I don't know. I think, I forgot if they asked me or if I had to go read for somebody, but I knew everybody in the play, and I knew the people who were producing it, so I don't know. I probably went in red and that was it. But I was excited because, and then when I found out he was coming over, it was like, because we did the other play, and it was, I don't know if you know the other play about face, but that's an incredible play. It's about a guy who gets transformed into the face of Johnny Añele, who was the president of Fiat, the owner of Fiat, you know? And it was all about hiding out and this guy being mistaken and his wife getting all confused. And it had a lot of resonance because it wasn't long after, I believe it was right after the Aldo Moro incident, which the prime minister of Italy was kidnapped and subsequently murdered because they wouldn't negotiate. And of course, in years later, it was very upsetting because a lot of people felt the government didn't negotiate because they weren't happy that Aldo Moro was willing to speak to the left as a coalition. And so they'd say, wow, we're not gonna negotiate and they took care of them for him. So were there any kind of, how would one say, edits or censorship or whatever to the play? Do you remember their fault? No, I mean, how did that go? Yeah, I don't think there was any. I mean, as I said, it was Richard Nelson's translation. That was a one-off. He did it and it's not even done. Before that, it was done a lot in London. It was very popular because if you look at the translations that are around, even this one, these things say words like bloke and arsehole, which we don't use. Well, we can, it's very colorful. I'd like to use them more often. And how successful was it? The right. Not successful. I remember going to the restaurant and I was a little late and I walked in and it was if somebody had let out the biggest part ever in the world because the times had just arrived. And those were the days when the New York Times arrived after a show and you knew whether you would go to work tomorrow or not. So how long was the run at the end? Three or four weeks, maybe, yeah. Oh, that's a good one. I might've been like, I don't think it was either. It was a guy after him. Might've been Bob. Was it a curve? Been in Birmingham? No, it was before that, Bob. It would've been whoever succeeded. Yeah, it might've been Richard. Yeah, he was starting out in those days. Barnes were rich. So a question for both of you. We don't want to talk about critics. No. Slay them! Slay them! Climb them out, Jesus! A question for Bob and also for Joe. Would it die of full play work now? Is that in that climate now with Trump and everything, would that? Bob? You're asking if his work is relevant today? Yeah, would it work? Would it work? Would people connect? Is it, would it be the same as 10 years ago or do you think something changed? He's always relevant. You know, the thing I like about Mistero Bufo and having watched him do it as a solo, the thing that's wonderful about it is, he's, when he gets to that point when he's talking, you know, and he's down there, he's just nailed him to the cross. It's his job, you know, that's his rice bowl, the guy. But he has to then go to him and he's very deferential. He's as deferential as any peasant in front of Christ would have been. Jesus, you know what I'm saying? Jesus, you know, you don't want to bother you, you know? But he has made flesh so I can talk to him. But the thing is, he sort of, Dario's very canny. He infers that you have to have all the respect that everybody has to have in order to talk to people. So if you're talking to people who are, say, in this country who are of a very strong, religious or fundamentalist beat, you know what I mean? He's gonna talk to you that way, you know? And I think what Bob said earlier is extraordinarily important. He said the writing and the writers exist and all that, but the bufo, the ability to entertain with it doesn't necessarily exist in abundance right now. And I know I teach millennials and they're so frigging serious I wanna shake them and kiss them and smack them. Because they gotta just, something's gotta happen. But the point is, it's very hard to do. And as I learned reading Brecht, cause Bob was the greatest proponent of Brecht and Kurt Weill was anybody at one point in the American period. I should add that he was not perfect though. And he did have a strong anti-Zionist quality in which led him to say that, to imply that what he called man-Zionists might have been responsible for the 2001 bombings. 2000, yeah, and I think, I don't know if he'd hold that position today, but he did then. And it was unfortunate. Yeah, there seems to be something that wants to hold that position almost everywhere. You know what I mean? I don't know why, but there seems to be something that wants to hold that position in corners that you least expected. I think his, the quote why he got most into trouble if I remember right, it was Susan Sontag, but also him, I think he gave an interview to a Rai radio reporter. And after the official interview was over, but the reporter did let the spool around. He did say, well, America got what it deserved. What do you expect, you know, after so many years of, in his view, imperialistic colonial acting around the world. Of course, somewhere or somewhere will come and try to destroy you. And as an artist's opinion, that should be respected as everything else, and nobody is always right as no one is always wrong. And I think it was unfortunate. When will we ever stop dealing and discovering that anti-Semitism was latent or evident in, I mean, Ezra Pound, and of course Wagner and all the others, it's just there. Yeah, it's almost like a club. Yeah, but maybe let's open up, let's put up the lights. Let me just make one point, but I wanted to finish what I was saying, Bob. Bob, the Brechtian thing, which I think was so important that I think is essential to foe, which if it ever becomes revived, it'll be great. But Brecht always said, you must teach and entertain, but in the same measure. And people don't get it. You know what I mean? They try, it's very hard to do. So to really entertain, you literally need to be watching something, you go, this is, I'm enjoying this, but how could I enjoy it? They just said that, or it's talking about this, but then I'm enjoying it. And Brecht's basically saying, that's the glue. That's the SAV that allows it to go into your system. That's the thing that allows it to enter you intravenously. And when it happens, you've learned something, but you haven't had a problem learning it. You know what I mean? You can think about it. And that's all. I just wanted to get that off my chest for some stupid reason. Yeah. Let me add a personal note, because he was also an extremely hospitable human being. And he invited the right Doreen and I to his home in Fort Lee, which was a lovely place in Tuscany on a pond. And he was extremely sweet to us. And I remember him personally and professionally with extraordinary affection and respect. Yeah. Well, one could argue about Brecht that perhaps after the three penny opera even Brecht himself was struggling to really do a successful theater, which pleases the audience, but also the critics and everybody agreed on it because his place became so very didactic also. A great example is Bob produced Happy End, a brilliant version of Happy End, which was the play that immediately followed three penny opera, out round the success of it. Happy End opened, if I got the story wrong, Bob, you correct me, but I know Michael Fangle will. Play opens in Berlin to great acclaim except Helena Weigel rewrites the last speech. So instead of it carrying through that the criticism that's inherent in the story about the meld of corruption and crime and the need for crime among poor people and yet the religious aspect, all of it, it's wonderfully bundled. She comes on and makes a very pointed speech against businessmen and capitalists and people like that. And the play closed like that because it was too strident, you see. That's where I remember. And this is where you walk. This is why just now we heard a line about Dario Fozandi or anti-Zionist, let's say. I wanna be correct on that. But it's like, in all of our minds, people fall off the straight and narrow. Of course, the problem is we create a point on that straight and narrow that's sharper and sharper and we pedestalize them and they're just schmucks like us. Well, we all make mistakes and we all have errors, but that is true what you said about Helena Weigel's bio speech and it's no longer in the play. It was very improvisation, actually. So the play does survive, even though we had the same trouble with it. It didn't last very long. I mean, it lasted, but it didn't get very good response from the critics. And you know, he didn't actually write the play. He's mischievous, so he's a sportsman. We wrote the play itself. He wrote the lyrics, which are brilliant. It's some of the best music you ever wrote, including Surabaya Chandy and others. The Bilbao song. The Bilbao song, too, yes. Anyway, we're not talking. Well, move to Germany in honor of you, Frank. Now, let's go back to Italy. Hey, hey, let's open up a little short bottle. And maybe some comments or some question. We have a microphone because we also record it and we also live stream it. So we have Jim first and then you. I've seen, I don't know, probably six, seven different productions of foes plays. And a very interesting one that was at ACT a number of years ago of the Pope and the Witch. And my overall experience is while there was something that was very interesting, very stimulating about them, I always felt that I was watching a musical composition that was maybe written in A minor, but was being played in C major. That something was preventing them from genuinely becoming a totality and really serving as a spontaneous comic whole. Having done the stuff that you've done, Joe, what would be, if I came to you as a young actor and said, give me one thing to hold on to to perform Dario foe. Well, I totally agree with you. And I think the Brits had success with foe for a while, but they kept putting it in the British idiom. And the more they did, the more it got away from that sort of inherent slap dash personality driven need in foes plays and the way foe performs them. There's almost a need for him to entertain himself. You see? And when it gets put out in formal theater, the way even great English speaking theater does, it gets kind of scrubbed. It gets kind of lost. That happened to our production on Broadway. And I never could figure, I knew there's something wrong. In fact, when Frank sent me to look at this material, I hadn't looked at the footage of foe on YouTube and stuff and I went, son of a bitch, that's how it does. That's how it works. You know what I mean? If it's gonna work. And you can't force the Italian idiom on the Italian comedy, a paradigm on Americans any more than you can force the British musical paradigm on us. Broadville works better for us. Musical works better for them. And there is that. And I'm sorry to say, people may try to force a square peg into a round hole forever and ever, but you've got to figure out a way to do that. I know in Germany, there was the foe reception was also divided by states whether they were Catholic or Protestant. In Catholic states, you know, it worked extremely well. People laughed and, in Protestant things like Hessian or others. People say, yeah, it's interesting, but they didn't collect on such a deep level because also that kind of play of foe with God, religion and Catholic thinking and suffering there. The ridiculous enough, this was not a mess strongly there, but we're gonna give the mic to you. I just wanted to say that, although the accidental death only ran, you said for three or four weeks. I saw it back then in 86. Thanks probably to TDF. And I remembered the name, Dario Fo, so that when I saw it in your literature here that you were going to be devoting the day to it, I remembered from all these years, I'd never had any exposure to them until I saw them on the screen this evening that it did last all those years. Yeah, so there was something, yeah. Well, you know, the ironies and the episodes in the play, that's, you know, that's, they kind of stick with you. Yeah, they're pretty, you know, pretty miserable. Another question, I'm over here. On the topic of contemporary relevance, I just wanted to say that the episodes that we saw in the films today involving Boniface the 8th, the narcissistic congenital liar whom Dante condemned to hell during his own lifetime certainly resonated with our imperfect president. Yeah, and also, Bob, you could say something about Dario's narcissism too. It's really, it's part and parcel of what he does in front of us, don't you think? Dario's own narcissism? Yeah, I find it really, you know, it's almost as if he's almost trying to remain relevant beyond his own narcissism. And it's a cat fight, you know? Sometimes he loses, sometimes he wins. Sometimes he wins, sometimes we win. But I don't know, you know, it's funny when you talk about the president or whoever, but I always thought Fo always, he took us strangely like the way he depicted Aniele, the president of Theod who was vilified as a pretty bad man by a lot of people, certainly the left. And some of the other people he talks about, he throws them a sympathetic bone in a way. He actually forces you to sort of like have to, I would love to see what he would do about this guy right now. It would be wonderful. He would say, no, he'd probably make him a kind of a befuddled victim in a way, you know? But he never erased the fact, as he does in some of those speeches, that Jesus, do you realize how many people have died and been quartered in the name, you know, in hawkests? I think in one of his latest flasks plays, he wrote, I think George Bush and Putin had some kind of a trained transplant or something. And it was kind of a farcical and political comedy, but here now, most probably that's a good observation that he would put him up as a new pope. I don't know that this comedia thing has always been die-bout. When I was studying at Yale, when Bob was there, I was so interested, I bought a book and I wanted to find out that he and everybody was trying to do it. And I said, I want to say forget about it. I just want to say forget about it. I don't know why it's always sort of something you want to refer to, and you think it's going to be magical. And then you do one of the plays and you find yourself stuck in a corner that isn't as relevant as it should be. It's like people trying to imitate Charles Chapman. Yeah. Actually, Tom and Darren does a terrific job. There's still a limitation, but there's something about building about Chapman that can't be about any of his imitations. It's the same thing, it's true of the Stereo Bufo. Yeah, although I do say though, I do think that having looked over this material again, there is, I think the answer is in some of the monologues. But the Mysterio Bufo completely produced when he was with his company, oh my God. The, just the choreography and all the things that give you great delight in watching, you know. Throwing, it's a lot of fun to watch. It's more fun than just listening to the words and I wish everybody could have that experience. I wonder if maybe an issue might be the relationship that American audiences have with clowns. There's a certain fear of clowns. And as opposed to, they're adorable. And I noticed just especially watching the material earlier that he brings the audience in, in a way that we don't really know how to do. Like he gets them in, he's not terrorizing them. He's saying, you're with me, we're gonna do this together. And maybe that approach made it work for him in a way that we don't naturally understand as American performers. Yeah, certainly he, in a way, he's a stand up comedian, right? I said the mic goes up in front of people. I like in the videos because people are right and left to him and in front, you know, almost like in a circus set and in a stage and. Well, again, I think our forms are, our forms are further away from that. I mean, physical stand up comedy is much closer to that in this country if you wanna make it out. But nobody's looking at that right now. They want it to be theater. And in theater, it gives it a certain validity and patina and probably gets better grants. You know, you can teach it, you can teach theater in academia that way, you know. So, you know, otherwise it would be. I mean, Lenny Bruce was very animated when he did his stuff. He did a lot of voices, he did a lot of characters, you know. And you get the feeling from Dario that having, I love it when he's bringing people and he's going, oh, you're late, sit over here, you know. Come on, okay. You know, go over there and he'll go, no, that's okay. Oh, you wanna walk across? Walk across, come on. Okay, well, what are you gonna do? What did you, did you eat late? You know, something like that, you know. I get the feeling that he needs that, you know. But I don't know, we don't, we've sort of parted ways a little bit between the forms. We segregate the forms a little bit and I don't know if we like it. I think, just like we're a little bit shy about sex, generally, we're a little, you know, we're shy about that too, you know. Some changing bodily fluids. Yeah. Oh no, I was just kidding, I'm seeing her, Bob. Now, I just wanted to add something about the use of language in Diophobe because you mentioned a lot of other contents about themes, topics that he... Oh my God, I thought it was him talking. No, no, no, it's me. I thought he was throwing his voice. Ventriloquismo, sorry. The use of language in Diophobe, you mentioned the gramma a lot and so he uses this language that is not a language as a kind of an instrument to tell story but rather the opposite upside down. It's a very post-modern concept, this way of deconstruct the language to tell a story but at the same time the language is built without having a language before the story. So it's like a circular relationship between telling story and having a means to communicate and that was very innovative and very post-modern at the time but at the same time rooted in a tradition. If you think about how he literate people in middle age, I don't know, he used to learn a language. That might be a way of empowering more literate people because they don't have to feel responsible for all the intellectuals who are standing behind them going, you know these illusions, right? You know what I'm talking about, right? No, it's like it makes everybody equally stupid and smart and I think it's kind of an interesting leveling of the perceptual field to give an advantage. I don't know what you would think but... Yeah exactly, it was like an happening. A happening is the telling story around the fire, I don't know, in the middle age or in ancient societies and in that way the culture of the community grows around the common language they developed in this happening. Right, yeah. So it's opposite as how modern theater worked until this, he played with language, I didn't trust language, it's the decentralization in a way of the central text as you know, it's now Hans-Tis Lehmann and so many others put on but maybe a question to Valeria also as a producer is Dario Fou performed in Italy at the moment? What's his legacy in Italy? In Italy he's a god because he died last year after a very big production in his life. Everybody knows the work of Dario Fou in Italy and I have a lot of thoughts about Dario Fou works also because I was, my teacher was the brother of Dario, Fulvio. Giacopo? No, Giacopo is the son. Oh the son, yeah. The brother was Fulvio, that was bigger, older than Dario and I have a lot of I've gone to some accounts. Stories. Stories about his juvenile life, there is a very, very funny to remember. Oh really? And also knowing that you know why he produced such a lot of innovative and visionary theater as he did because he grew up during the war and his heart grew up during the war and he was a very funny, funny guy with all the crew of friends and other people that challenged in heart what was going on around as the war period, World War II. So I am very interested in all the things that is up in today because it is strange for me to know about Dario Fou here in U.S. because it was interdict as you told. So it was a terrorist here. Now I know what happened the other side of the ocean but I didn't know it now. So it's very interesting to know that. I think right now he'd have, thank you. Tough time deciding which government to make fun of, the Italian or the American because they're both going like, boop boop boop. You know they're, pazzo. Was it there in both ways? Yeah, in their own ways. It would be too much. You would have a short circuit. I got the distinct impression just on a person to person level that Franca just meeting her was the more, she was a little more serious about the present politics of the day. So it was a little more, but I don't know. I mean, unless he was just, she seemed like she really was determined to raise money to help a lot of these people especially that were being thrown in jails and stuff like that. But you know, Valeria, you can say the whole idea that always kind of baffles me is, you know how fashionable the Communist Party was in the 60s and 70s. It's a whole different feeling, you know what I mean? It had a whole different vibe, you know? It wasn't like the, you know, there was a sort of a a trendiness to it. It was different, it was only avant spectacles in Italy. Avant spectacles is a form of theater that was born just to fight against the boring period of war. So it's interesting how the avant spectacles changed in the innovative theater in the 60s and 70s. And then in the 80s, and then bye bye, because now we are in the medieval evil. So we are working to go out, you know, Frank, you know. Yeah, and then for sure it's a very fragile theater as Bob said, you know, it doesn't travel so well. It's complicated. I think he grew up with glass blowers in his little town. He always said he admired them. So in glasses. Where did he grow up again? I think he was in Northern Italy, right? He grew up in Northern Italy, Daria? In Luino, in Luino. Luino, yeah. In North, it's North of Milan. Oh, get on. Okay, yeah. And by what I admired, I saw him perform also in tents in Italy. He was such an authentic performer. He owned his theater. He was not working for some, he was not hired. He did not do it just for, he loved it. He enjoyed it also. And he set energy free and he did it with nothing really in that kind of idea of a poor theater in that, not in the Kortalski sense, but he really, really had just a microphone and he created universes on stage and really was, I think, on the right side of justice and politics and the end of the arts. And fun. And really, really. That's what I think. You make people laugh and I think this is something that is important. We all have to remember that in that, you know, to have a smile and also to communicate what we want to do in theater that it's a big lesson from his side. I mean, the only people compared to him as a couple would be most probably Julius Molina and Julian Back, you know, would be the American counterpart of Frank Aram and Dario Fo. But they weren't funny. They weren't, well, I think they were funny, but not always in the production. They were, but not like that. I mean, right, Bob? I mean, not funny. That was funny. You remember he invited them to the Repertory Theater his first year and he had to go bail them out of jail. No, I think, she was, Julius was, I think, had a great sense of you, but maybe not always in the work. Well, Heiner Müller, if you look at, yeah, deadly, yeah, it was serious. Or if you look at the work of Heiner Müller or a Pasolini in a way, it was, you know, much more serious approach as a... They went out to the streets of their underwear. Yeah. They all got arrested. Yeah. So, but it is remarkable that they, as a couple, you know, really wrote theater history. To get arrested in your underwear. Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah. So... Can I say two things about... Yes. One is that I'm really extremely impressed by his knowledge of Dario. And two, that Joe probably did the best of this being in the history of the productions of Midsummer Night's Dream. Two times, both at Yale and at the American Repertory. Yeah, he was hilarious and I'll never forget that performance. So thank you for that, Joe. There he is, Laker. You already see it. This was that. Well, let me do it for you. Okay, it starts out, Midsummer Night's Dream. Well, there's this flute guy. He's the main character. No, it was a fortunate... Bob, we put together an ensemble. It was, I'll never forget, because Alvin Epstein was directing and Alvin was always so busy looking at designs and dealing with his poodles in rehearsal that he didn't mind that me and Chuck and Jerry Dempsey and whoever else was Fred Moore, we would say, Bob, we're gonna work on the scene. We really created those scenes ensemble, you know? You couldn't go for those laughs that we got without everybody being in on it and being happy with it. But the good thing is you got a note from Bob even 30 years later on your performance. And so don't forget to give him a note of tonight. I think we are close at two time now and we would like to thank Joe, of course, for coming, preparing for Bob, who's in the Star Trek movies, the admiral who's beamed in on the screen. So admiral Bob, thank you so much for joining us tonight and let's all, you know, really send a farewell to Dario for one of the greats of the theater. And as far as we know, it's the only evening in both America's honoring him and he really deserves that. So thank you all for coming and thank you Bob and Joe, thank you. Thank you. Good talk.