Italian playwright Dario Fo (born 1926) is known for his satirical and often controversial works. He was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although he has been hailed by critics worldwide for his acting abilities and especially for his...

Dario Fo and Popular Performance. By ANTONIO SCUDERI. With a Foreword by JOSEPH FARRELL. Ottawa: Legas. 1998. 119 pp. $17.95. This nuanced study of Dario Fo's debt to the traditions of European popular theatre appeared shortly after the polymath Italian actor-director-playwright was...

Dario Fo's 1969 play "Comic Mystery" ("Mistero Buffo"), translated by Ed Emery, from "Dario Fo, Plays: One," published by Methuen Drama (London, 1993), retells several biblical tales, including the marriage at Cana. Fo's narrator is a drunk recalling one of the best binges...

Today is Tuesday, Oct. 9, the 282nd day of 2007. There are 83 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Oct. 9, 1967, Latin American guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed while attempting to incite revolution in Bolivia.On this date:In 1446, the Korean alphabet,...

Mitchell offers a detailed examination of Mistero Buffo. This work, he declares, "and its many offshoots, together with the countless improvised routines and sketches on topical events which Fo frequently makes up on the spot, reveal him as the 'theatrical animal' that he is, and show his unique capacity for turning a one-man show into a piece of epic and total theatre."

In the following, Fo discusses influences on his work in the theater.

In the following essay, Wing contends: "By presenting [in Mistero Buffo a kind of fragmented iconicity—fragments of characters, fragments of actions and interactions—Fo has shaped a dramatic montage in which the shifting perspectives force a sense of community. There is no time to identify privately with one character or point of view; the spectator is too busy in every given moment, working on the collective creation of the event."]