SOURCE: "The Iconicity of Absence: Dario Fo and the Radical Invisible," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, October 1993, pp. 303-15.

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."]

In demonstration of the mysterious power of absence as a staging technique, Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo recounts an intriguing tale of a performance at a mental institution for "untreatable cases" in Turn, Italy.¹ Fo was in the midst of a skit involving an archangel and a drunk, in which he, himself, played both characters, a task which...