Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Mel Gussow

Critical Essay by Mel Gussow

As playwright monologist and public personality, Dario Fo is an impertinent iconoclast, provoking officialdom at the same time that he is tickling his audience. Among contemporary playwrights who are concerned with the theater of politics—writers as diverse as Fernando Arrabal, David Hare and Caryl Churchill—Fo has distinguished himself not only as an author but as a performer of his own work. Imagine a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Lenny Bruce and you may begin to have an idea of the scope of Fo's anarchic art. In common with Brecht, he is seeking social change; in common with Bruce, he is often scatological and blasphemous….

Though the Fo-Rame sketches [in "Adulto Orgasmo Escapes From the Zoo"] were supposedly written in the 70's, to American eyes they seem decades out of date—simplistic outbursts against woman's incarceration in bed and kitchen by boorish men. Perhaps more than anything, they are an indication of...
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