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."]

In the following essay, Cowan traces Fo's career and delineates the essential characteristics of his works.

[In the following essay, Wing argues that, especially in his one-man skits, Fo causes the visible to become invisible, requiring the audience's participation to fill the gaps.]

[In the following essay, Cairns focuses on Fo's 1985 Harlequin production and examines his contemporary adaptation of commedia techniques.]

In the essay below, D'Aponte assesses the impact Fo has had on American theater.

[In a close examination of Fo's Trumpets and Raspberries and Almost by Chance a Woman: Elizabeth, Schechter argues for Fo's timeliness as a humorist and his identification as perhaps the last great theatrical satirist.]

In this essay, Farrell discusses the difficulties inherent in attempting to translate Fo's works. Fo, he states, "requires more than standard translation techniques. He requires deep understanding tempered by affection. The adapter is a presence in Fo translation because he is needed. "

[In the following essay, Piccolo focuses on the binary theatrical technique, giullarata, which alternates between a narrative voice and quotes from various characters, and examines the connection between dialogue structure and the type of knowledge it yields.]

[In the following essay, Fo is viewed as a successor to earlier twentieth-century "Italian geniuses of the comic spirit" Totò and Eduardo De Filippo.]

In the following essay, Wing maintains that the form of Accidental Death of an Anarchist reinforces its content. The provisional, ever-changing nature of the play, she argues, demonstrates that the "notion of a single, monolithic, political truth is shown to be as corrupt as the notion of a unified, cohesive, theatrical representation."

Rame is Fo's wife and collaborator. In the essay below, which was written in 1975, she recalls their early years working together.

[In the following essay, Farrell presents Fo as a political revolutionary but a theatrical conservative in that he employs traditional characters and styles dating from the Medieval performers, giullare, to promote his radical politics.]

In this essay, Jenkins argues that "Fo has developed a modern style of epic performance that speaks to his audience with the immediacy of a newspaper editorial, shifts perspectives with the fluidity of cinematic montage, and pulsates with the rhythmic drive of a jazz improvisation."

[In the following essay, Jenkins analyzes Fo's "fusion of subversive politics and poetic slapstick."]

In the following, Schechter emphasizes the political satire in Fo's work.

In the essay below, Hood provides a broad survey of Fo's career.

[In the following essay, Bohlen emphasizes the controversy created by the Nobel Committee's selection of Fo as the 1997 laureate in literature.]

[In the essay below, Emery analyzes Fo's Trumpets and Raspberries in relation to the use of masks, the nature of characters, the use of stock gags, and the representation of power as in the commedia tradition and carnival celebrations.]

[In the essay below, Gussow sees Fo's award as an expansion of the boundaries of literature, legitimation of the world of performance, and recognition of the contribution of comedy, especially political satire.]

[Below, Schwartz identifies Fo as undeserving of the Nobel Prize because he has "dedicated his life to the promotion of everything discredited, despicable, and socially destructive in modern culture."]

[In the following review of the Arena Players Repertory Theater production of We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Frank lauds the play's humor but finds the story itself lacking verisimilitude.]

The rude view of Dario Fo is that he is, in the current jargon, an unabashed pill-coater. That is, he inveigles us into swallowing his radical nostra by plastering them with funny lines, entertaining business, and farcical rough-and-tumble ultimately derived from the commedia dell'arte. It sounds pretty indigestible, not to say dubiously therapeutic; and so it would no doubt prove in practice, if his humour really were external rather than innate, imposed rather than intrinsic. As it happens, though,...

I am not very fond of one-man plays. Or one-woman, one-trained-seal, one-anything plays…. Generally speaking, there is something demoralizing about going to theatrical solos—like being invited to dine off paper plates. There are, however, exceptions: if the performer is great, the material is marvelous, or the situation, though dramatic, calls for a monologue—say, the story of Jonah. A little of all three of these conditions obtains in Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo….

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...

The plays [which make up "Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo"] are uncompromising in their convictions. And yet we sit … [in the theater] with the sinking sensation that "Orgasmo Adulto" isn't provoking the laughter, thought or outrage it intends…. The concerns of all eight pieces are similar. As the actress explains in a chatty, relaxed prologue, "Orgasmo Adulto" is "an entertainment about the condition of women"—or, more ...

Dario Fo is a high-spirited Italian dramatist in an Aristophanic tradition who writes plays as if Karl Marx and Groucho Marx were contending for his soul. The result of this unlikely struggle is a species of left-wing political farce, a rare theatrical form regularly practiced in this country only by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Fo has two reigning passions, not always well integrated in his work—a passion for justice and a passion for the absurd. In We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, for e...

If you are deflated by thoughts of inflation, if you have ever looked at the price of food in the supermarket or glanced at a menu in a restaurant and decided that we had suddenly moved to a different, less rewarding monetary system, then Dario Fo's "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" should fill you with laughs of recognition…. Mr. Fo's manic farce should be obligatory viewing for anyone battling, i.e., succumbing to, the high cost of living. For the purposes of h...

In these wide open, permissive, seen and heard it all before '80s, is it possible for a play to be "a direct political intervention" in or a "radical criticism" of society? Italian wife-and-husband playwriting team Franca Rame and Dario Fo make a good case for the possibility, though it isn't entirely convincing and is probably more valid in Italy where women are more restricted by men, state and church than in the U.S. "Female Parts" is made up of two...

I went off to see Einer fur alle, alle fur einen … with no great hopes…. But Signor Fo, however dubious his political common-sense has been in the past, tells us in the programme that he soon grasped the fact that documentary and … didactic plays were death to real theatre. And this piece is a splendid example of how to make political theatre enjoyable. It deals with the Italian scene between 1911 and the outbreak, as one may call it, of Fascism. The stage casually embodies a lorry taki...

There is every indication of comic ingenuity in "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!," a farce…. [A director's note in the program says], "In this play there are a number of stories, which are related to the socio-economic conditions of inflation, retold within the structure of a household comedy…." Fortunately, Fo—whatever his odd theories about drama, and whatever his political allegiances—is much friskier than his director. There are in...

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 America...

[In Can't Pay? Won't Pay! (also performed as We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!), the] fun, though considerable and expertly staged, spirals too far beyond what it more or less remains in Accidental Death and One-Woman Plays, the logical reflection, illustration and exploration of subject and theme. Specifically, would the 'respectable' CP member really convince himself that the stolen vegetables his rebellious wife has stuffed up her jumper are actually a pregnancy transp...