Johan Padan and theDiscovery of the Americas
By Dario Fo. Translated and directed by Ron Jenkins. With Thomas Derrah. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through September 16.

If Harlequin had discovered America, this would have been his story — full of adventure, wonder, and pratfalls. Italian playwright/clown and Nobel Laureate Dario Fo created Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas as a vehicle for himself, using 16th-century accounts of the exploration and plundering of the Americas to create a fantastical account of history by a fly on the wall. Johan Padan is a happy-go-lucky inventive Italian fleeing the Inquisition who winds up a permanent expatriate, living among the indigenous people on this side of the pond. His tale, told in its American premiere by the American Repertory Theatre’s gifted Thomas Derrah and illustrated by the whimsical and sensual paintings Fo created for the work, is a shaggy-dog history, full of funny sounds and racist fury. Piquant and political, it’s an Eden-crashing documentary fantasy that goes on too long. But in Derrah’s hands (and innumerable other constantly moving body parts), under the direction of translator Ron Jenkins, it’s also a marathon tour de force. Despite Julia Child–worthy preparations that include painting his penis blue, the Native Americans don’t eat up Johan Padan, but the audience does.

Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas is the kickoff of a Dario Fo Festival that will feature, later this month, performances by the man himself and his longtime collaborator and wife, Franca Rame. Meanwhile we have Johan Padan, with (in his words) a fire at his ass and another at his balls, dodging trouble in the midst of the conquistadors’ rape and pillage of the newly discovered Americas. Our hapless hero jumps a ship in Venice and another in Seville, both times one step ahead of the law, and winds up in the Indies " in spite of himself. " A zany from Bergamo, he proceeds to an epic series of adventures inspired by Fo’s research into the journals of Cabeza de Vaca and a handful of lesser-known crew members. Episodic and fanciful, the story — frankly recounted as such — is vintage Fo, its fractured history decorated with digs at the Catholic Church and underlaid with an innocent if racy celebration of sexuality that stretches back to the Garden.

Derrah takes the Loeb stage armed with little more than his casually clad nimble person and Fo’s artful illustrations of his tall tale: playful travel-poster sketches richly splashed with color. As translator/director Jenkins points out, what seems a long two-part monologue is actually several dialogues: between the performer and his audience, between the contemporary clown and his omniscient stooge of a 16th-century character, between history and imagination, between art and words and body. Derrah juggles it all like a one-man Flying Karamazov clan, with an impressive combination of narrative and kinetic skill, creating a character who is part Borscht Belt comic, desperate to please, part Peter Pan/Candide, and part liar love child of Don Quixote and Lillian Hellman. As Johan Padan, he not only tells a story that includes sex, slaughter, several hurricanes, and the use of a pig as a lifeboat but provides a Foley-worthy soundtrack — everything from castanets to exploding fireworks. And his body is in constant motion, whether in leaping dance or fussy gesture. Even Derrah’s yellow-fringed Charlie Brown face is capable of transformation, most notably into the scowling, long-toothed visage of the Inca — short, we’re told, for " inconsolably pissed off. "

But Johan Padan is not a laugh-a-minute piece; it tends to traverse rather than build upon its historical, chimerical territory, and, at over two hours, the material can seem belabored. Moreover, for all of the low comedy and clowning, the piece, like the farces that have earned Fo the label " subversive, " has more on its mind than how to have sex in a hammock. As the playwright’s European nonentity wanders the New World, interacting with the ironically dubbed " savage natives " and moving up in their ranks from potential snack to accidental shaman, he’s witness to butchery and enslavement (and not just by his team). That these events are often casually, if excitedly, recounted only serves to underline their cruelty. In Fo’s wishful fracturing of history, the marauders get their comeuppance and Padan and the Indians win. But there is poignancy even in our hero’s triumph, which is laced with displacement. Among the things he misses: the comforting trappings of the Christianity in whose name so much of the play’s peripheral evil is done. Go figure.

Issue Date: September 13 - 20, 2001