Dario Fo and Franca Rame have been doing it for 50 years. And Ron Jenkins has been doing it with them for 15. For the American Repertory Theatre, that’s cause for celebration. Better yet, an entire September festival.

As master comedians, Fo and Rame have long been recognized as national treasures in their native Italy and throughout Europe. The couple first met in 1951 while performing in a satirical revue in Milan. Their marriage three years later solidified a partnership in life and art that has spanned half a century and generated an unparalleled body of work for the stage, for which Fo received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. Ron Jenkins is a scholar of political and physical comedy all around the world, a former circus clown, and chairman of the theater department at Wesleyan University. His research on Fo and Rame began in the mid 1980s; it achieves a bountiful moment of fruition in the coming weeks with the release of a new book and the ART’s Dario Fo Festival.

The festival marks the Fo & Rame golden jubilee with three big events. Starting September 6, the ART will present the American premiere of Fo’s one-man play Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas. Translated and directed by Jenkins, the extended monologue features ART veteran Thomas Derrah, whose Fo aptitude was ably demonstrated two years ago in the ART production of We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! and in 1989 in the Jenkins-directed production of Story of the Tiger at Charlestown Working Theatre. Then, alternating for 10 nights beginning September 20, Fo and Rame will make a rare American appearance, performing (in Italian) their respective signature one-person shows, Mistero Buffo and Sex? Thanks, Don’t Mind If I Do! Jenkins will provide simultaneous on-stage translation for these performances, as he did 15 years ago for Mistero Buffo when Fo made his American debut at the House of Brustein. All this coincides with the release of Jenkins’s Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter, an Aperture coffee-table book richly illustrated with Fo’s sketches, drawings, and paintings.

When I meet with Jenkins in his Cambridge apartment, we talk about his book, the upcoming festival, the legacy of Fo and Rame, and his unique perspective on their body of work. " Body " is the operative word here because Fo’s writing is rooted in the language of the body: the sudden movement, the evocative gesture, the expressive facial reaction. This physical language, Jenkins insists, stems from the extensive preliminary sketches and drawings he makes when he sets to work on a new performance piece. Image, word, and gesture are co-extensive in Fo’s theater. This is the central argument of Jenkins’s book, and to reinforce the point, the author leads me to his kitchen and a large poster depicting Fo’s fantastical vision of Cesenatico, his summer home on Italy’s Adriatic coast (between Ravenna and Rimini). It shows a colorful and bustling town center with a river running through it. People are flying in the air, walking on the water, dancing on the lampposts, and making love in the streets. Dolphins are jumping, a giraffe stands in mid air, an elephant strides a roof in the distance. Cannons are blasting everywhere, and along one embankment there’s a makeshift stage with a performance going on. " It is a wonderful and kinetic vision of the beautiful absurdity of life, " Ron says. " Now, let’s go over here. "

We return to the living room to look at another poster; this one comprises a series of black-and-white photographs of Fo at different moments of an animated performance. " When he turns the vision that he paints into action, " Jenkins explains, " his body becomes all the figures that he draws. He swirls and spins and stretches and jumps and dances. And all of that is embedded in the words that he writes. The rehearsal process is a matter of excavating the wonderful energy and paradoxes encoded in the language and releasing all the physical and verbal fun that Dario packs into the words. "

ART patrons will get a chance to test this principle for themselves. Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas recounts the epic misadventures of a Renaissance common man and perpetual fugitive who, in order to avoid the Spanish Inquisition, becomes a stowaway on one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World. " When Fo wrote this play, " says Jenkins, " he did all this research into the diaries of Cabeza de Vaca and other explorers, and then the next thing he did was draw dozens and dozens of pictures of this encounter between the two worlds. Then he looked at the pictures and improvised stories. The words came out of the pictures, inseparable from the actions and the movements that he used to tell the story. So the piece was born in a kinetic way. Tommy is a wonderfully kinetic actor, so he understands instinctively that you don’t just talk the language, you evoke it with the whole body. "

Jenkins hands me a copy of Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter, which include Fo’s Johan Padan paintings, some of which will be projected as a backdrop for Derrah’s solo performance. " If you flip through these pages, it is almost like a documentary film of the discovery of America. The camera angle keeps changing and the point of view keeps changing. There’s a close-up here and a long shot there. And that is what the actor has to do: become a human movie camera and use his body to change all the camera angles and his voice to move from close-up to long shot. And of course as an actor, Tommy has to play not only the title character of Johan Padan. He has to be a whole tribe of Indians, a shipful of sailors, a wild horse, turkeys, iguanas, a cast of thousands. He is a one-man epic movie on the stage. And along the way, you are also getting lessons on how to make love in a hammock in the 16th century, how to make iguana stew, and how to tame wild horses by tying up their testicles. This is the imagination of Dario Fo. For him, absurdity and paradox is a way of thinking. These things that he invents seem so wild and fantastical, but somehow they are more true and less absurd than a lot of things that we take for granted. "

This is where Fo’s comedy meets up with his political purposes. He and Rame have always been champions of the oppressed, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. The Nobel citation praised him for emulating the medieval jester-storytellers known as the giullari by " scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden. . . . With a blend of laughter and gravity he opens our eyes to abuses and injustices in society and also the wider historical perspective in which they can be placed. " Fo and Rame used a portion of the $1 million Nobel Prize to establish a foundation for the handicapped in Italy.

As a writer and an actress, Rame has focused much of her energy on depicting the plight of women in modern society, often turning to Biblical (Adam and Eve) and classical (Medea) subjects as a way of getting at more-contemporary concerns. Developed in the mid 1990s, Sex? Thanks, Don’t Mind If I Do! is the most recent of her one-woman shows. Written with her husband and son, the piece is a series of mix-and-match monologues, fables, anecdotes, and reports that offer a frank, funny, and feminist view of sex and sexuality. As Jenkins points out, Rame and Fo have different and complementary strengths as performers, and that broadens their range as a duo. Whereas Fo’s work tops out in the manic extremes of slapstick, Rame’s style extends into the tragically serious, including a confessional monologue in which she recounts her rape in 1973 by right-wing political terrorists.

Issue Date: August 30 - September 6, 2001