We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of Dario Fo (Collected Plays of Dario Fo (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: Fo's Journey
Review: A.L. Bell, in his ingnorance has overlooked the fact the Fo's statement is quite true, and if further researched his review would have also stated the fact that Mr. Fo had been one of Italy's greatest political satirists and has provided Europe with great satirical works in the latter part of the last century and continues to do so.

Rating:
Summary: A most deserved Nobel Prize
Review: Dario Fo is a great artist and a great man. With his wife Franca he has written some of the best pages of Italian culture. I had the fortune of watching them act (live and on TV) in most of their plays. With the barest stage they can convey the richest combination of form and substance. They represent the core of the profound culture and sensitivity of the Italian working class, which so important has been in the social development of that country, and still is little known abroad (shaded by the stereotypical and outdated images of mandolins, meatballs, and mafiamen). I deeply encourage anyone to read as much as possible of what Dario has written.

I found on this website a review claiming that "Fo supports the WTC attackers". The author of that review should have gone a little deeper in reading the facts, just to discover that the intended message of the reported statement was quite opposite to the alleged one. The original text that includes the statement can be found at ...(in Italian). I believe the misunderstanding is far from casual. Nowadays the Italian Prime Minister controls almost every information medium. He has restored most of the political and cultural conditions that Italy was forced to "enjoy" between 1922 and 1943. It has become very hard for dissenting voices to reach a wide audience without having their messages distorted on the way. The "Corriere della Sera" excerpt from Dario and Franca's email on the 9/11 tragedy is just one more example of how easy it is to manipulate the truth by simply reporting minimal parts of it.

Rating:
Summary: Theatre in Action
Review: For decades Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, have created some of the most interesting political theatre of the 20th century. Fo's work deals with social injustice, political freedom and economic policies. He often expresses pro-communist views. Common themes in Fo's work include critiques of fascism and terrorism. Much of his work is targeted at the working class

Fo is known for his use of the Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte. This tradition allows Fo to exploit taboo subjects in highly comic situations. Like the commedia dell'arte tradition, Fo's humor is bawdy and over the top. It is tremendously absurd and equally as witty.

Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

We Can't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Ordinary Couple are my favorite works by Dario Fo.

Rating:
Summary: Fo supports the WTC attackers
Review: While the ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning and the ashes of the dead were still getting into people's eyes, Fo and Franca Rame released this statement:

"The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty -- so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"

The United States has many problems with its foreign policy, which have been the subject of vigorous debate. Not one of those weaknesses is justification for 6,000 people of every imaginable type being chopped up into little bits and incinerated by the equivalent of a low-radiation nuclear attack without anyone so much as pulling a fire alarm.

Fo and his wife are worse here than the attackers themselves. Maybe the attackers had no idea what the damage they would cause would really be like. Maybe, if they could have jumped forward in time 24 hours and seen the results, they would have repented. They come from a vastly different culture and may have just seen things differently than we see them. But Fo and Rame are westerners who saw the devastation on TV before writing this.

Censoring Fo and his wife would wrong, but I hope others out there will join me in hoping that Dante actually has a ghost, and that Dante's will be in charge of managing their stay in Hell.