Theater Review—

Hidden Within Its Serious Message, ‘We Won’t Pay!

We Won’t Pay!’ Also Offers Great Comedy

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — In the event you’ve never heard of it, Autodiduzione, or “self-reduction,” refers to a populist rebellion that took place in northern Italy in the late Sixties and Seventies, when a sputtering economy led to a simultaneous wave of industrial layoffs and grocery price increases. While factory workers deliberately “reduced” their productivity by up to 45 percent, their wives stormed the supermarkets and refused to pay the listed prices for food. Similarly, they stopped paying rent, gas and electric bills, and refused to honor price increases for bus and train fares.

Dario Fo, an Italian clown, actor and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, made Autodiduzione the subject of his most famous comic farce, We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! which has been performed in over thirty countries, but is barely known in America. Long Wharf Theatre’s take of Fo’s work continues through April 4.

You might think that a play by a Nobel laureate, about an economic protest that took place back in Milan in the 1970s, might be a bit dated or inaccessible.

Forget that.

Translator Ron Jenkins, who holds both a doctorate from Harvard and a master’s degree from the Ringling Brothers Clown College, has fashioned a piece of social comedy that comes across like the Three Penny Opera (without music) as done by The Honeymooners combined with I Love Lucy, with perhaps a touch of the San Francisco Mime Troupe thrown in.

Antonia, who is the “Lucy” style heroine of the farce, impulsively takes part in a riot at the local supermarket and comes home with as many bags of groceries as she can carry. Fearful that her moralistic husband Giovanni will be angry at her for looting (despite their poverty) she convinces her best friend Margherita to hide some of the stolen goods under her skirt.

When Giovanni notices Margherita’s peculiar new shape, Antonia tells him that Margherita is nine months pregnant, but has been hiding her condition for fear that her husband Luigi will disapprove.

As the police storm the building in search of contraband foodstuffs, Antonia and Margherita weave more and more complicated lies. There are all kinds of sight gags and farcical devices like a wardrobe, an empty coffin, and a spilled jar of olives that Antonia identifies to a suspicious Giovanni as amniotic fluid. What makes it all work – and keeps the audience convulsed with laughter – are the spirited character portrayals.

Although Fo is acclaimed for carrying on the tradition of the old Italian Comedia del Arte, his two strong heroines have clear comic roots in Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, while the interplay between the two working class stiffs, Giovanni and Luigi, is right out of Art Carney and Jackie Gleason.

Mimi Lieber is wonderful as the frenetically inspired fabricator, Antonia, while Susan Greenhill uses frantic body language and facial expressions to convey her doubts and anxieties. John Procaccino and Andrew Polk are droll foils for the machinations of their wives, but they also serve to articulate the playwright’s serious point that in a culture of poverty, hunger strips human beings of dignity, and, as Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill pointed out, when people’s bellies are empty, morality doesn’t have much meaning for them.

The message is there, but above all, We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! is a very funny play.

(Performances are Wednesday through Sunday evenings and weekend afternoons. The theater, at 222 Sargent Drive in New Haven, can be contacted at 203-787-4282 for additional information.)