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The Poets prove friends of Fo
BY IRIS FANGER
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Accidental Death of an Anarchist
By Dario Fo. Directed by John Quinn. Set by Lori Meade. Lighting by Jeri Sikes. With Aidan Parkinson, Andrew Sullivan, Gaëtan Bonhomme, Evelyn Seijido, Jayk Gallagher, Richard Gilman, and Nadia de Lemeny. Presented by the Poets’ Theatre at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway through October 26.
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Dario Fo, the Nobel Prize–winning comic actor, playwright, and anti-establishment political activist, wrote Accidental Death of an Anarchist to his own strengths as an antic clown out to change the world by reducing his enemies to objects of derision. It was no small task because the enemies he targets are big business, government by the mighty for their own benefit, and the Church, meaning the Catholic hierarchy of his native Italy. The Poets’ Theatre has risen from the flames again to produce Accidental Death, no doubt because of the obvious parallels to life in America right now, with our Office of Homeland Security and the ever-changing versions of so-called truths emanating from Washington. Boston-based actor Aidan Parkinson, currently the troupe’s artistic director, has a gift for comedy among his considerable skills. And the play’s main character, which Fo originated, offers him one juicy role. Whether the play qualifies as poetry is perhaps a nagging aside. But the 53-year-old organization was founded to give a theatrical voice to such poets as John Ashbery, Richard Eberhart, Frank O’Hara, and Richard Wilbur. Thornton Wilder and William Carlos Williams served on the Poets’ first board. The Theatre flourished for a decade before being extinguished by a fire that left it in ashes for 25 years. After a brief resurrection in the mid 1980s, it has been largely dormant except for some flutterings in 1999. Parkinson takes center stage as the Maniac, who carries a briefcase filled with credentials from the asylums where he’s spent time. Fo based his 1970 play on an incident that had taken place in a Milan police station the previous year, when an anarchist "fell" to his death from a fourth-story window in the building while being interrogated. Fo’s gimmick — tailor-made to his own talents — is the Maniac’s penchant for impersonation, à la Alec Guinness in the classic 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets. The Maniac takes on various roles to snare the cops into admitting their part in the faux suicide. Parkinson talks fast, changes from one outrageous wig to another, and adds and sheds plastic appendages as if it were Halloween, to create a milieu of mayhem as he pursues his goal. He’s also adroit at the physical maneuvers of changing his posture and walk, as well as enlisting stretched-out gestures to keep his opponents off balance. There’s a hint of Groucho in his mannerisms, and vaudeville-type pratfalls alternate with a dead-serious calm. Of course, the play’s cops are venal and the death of the Anarchist was no suicide, as the Maniac well knows. Parkinson’s performance is as outsized as the role; perhaps it’s the one that will launch him beyond the Irish orbit of his best-known local performances The rest of the company is uneven, though Richard Gilman makes a convincing Superintendent, and there’s a fine performance from area newcomer Nadia de Lemeny as the savvy woman journalist who enters near the end to nail the policemen — a role that Fo probably wrote for his wife and stage partner, Franca Rame. A woman who comes armed with the facts and the smarts to state them clearly, she’s the dea ex machina who forces the climax and the resolution — such as it is, since Fo realizes that there are no simple solutions to the problem of abuse of power. This production of Anarchist has been updated with references to local events including the scandal in the Catholic Church as well as various national embarrassments. A photograph of Dubya hanging on the wall behind the police officer’s desk calls to mind the ubiquitous presence of Saddam Hussein’s visage throughout Iraq before the American invasion. The return of the Poets’ Theatre is a welcome blast from the past. Here’s hoping the organization will remember its origins and find a way to offer some of the contemporary generation of poets a voice on stage.
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