A play about inflation could hardly be more topical, and although it was written in 1974, Dario Fo's Italian farce, "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!," is as up-to-date as the morning paper's supermarket ads. There's an abundance of laughs in this leftwing blast at economic imbalance….

"We Won't Pay!" shows a masterful hand at farcical plotting and comic characterization, plus a distinctively European political underpinning. Few American playwrights have much overt commitment to any political viewpoint, left, right or center, so Fo's radical anticapitalistic didacticism is at least fresh….

It's also very funny. The story turns on a consumers' revolt by lire-starved workingclass housewives in Milan who pilfer large quantities of overpriced food, then try to hide it from investigating cops by stuffing it under their dresses and claiming pregnancy. The central femme character, an Italian cousin of one of Brecht's proletarian heroines, is also forced to hide...