Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which opened at the Berkeley Rep this evening, is both the funniest and the most serious show I’ve ever seen at this theatre. The author is Italy’s famous Dario Fo — Nobel Prize for Literature, 1997 — and the setting is 1970 Milan, but the Rep has tweaked the script so that it might have taken place right here and yesterday. Even Diane Feinstein’s speech on the CIA is in the dialogue.
The plot centers on the death of a suspect in police custody. He was a railroad worker, member of a tiny anarchist group, and the police accused him of setting a bomb in the local railway station. Somehow, the man fell to his death from a fourth-story window of the police station. The police initially claimed he committed suicide, then changed their story to the equally unbelievable “accidental death.” The action of the play takes place on two floors of the police station a few weeks after the incident.
At the start, a man is brought into the station on charges of impersonating various people, including a psychiatrist. The man — played by the brilliant Steven Epp — pretends to be certifiably insane, and gives a convincing and hilarious demonstration of his lunacy. But we soon learn that he is crazy like a fox. He manages to impersonate a judge magistrate who is sent to examine the police responsible for the anarchist’s death, and through this disguise he eventually provokes the men to re-enact what really happened. This exposition is side-splittingly funny. I have never guffawed so explosively and spontaneously as when Epp appears in yet another disguise, that of a senior police inspector, to be interviewed by a reporter (the excellent Renata Friedman).
There’s quite a bit of what feels like ad libbing in the second half, though with a cast this skillful it’s impossible to tell what’s improv and what’s in the script. In keeping with Fo’s commedia del’ arte style, actors frequently address the audience, step out of character, comment on the script, make jokes at their own expense, and otherwise break the invisible glass wall between the stage and the house. At moments like this, the whole scene comes alive most wonderfully and ceases to be merely a spectacle, it becomes an experience.
The whole cast are marvelously skilled clowns, but Epp is over the top. His seemingly indestructible vocal cords soar to heights of comic histrionics and dive in an instant to satiric magisterial gravitas, and he belts out a pretty good ballad, besides. Physically, he’s a shape-shifting tornado, capable of everything and anything. Ma is hilarious in a supporting role, and tops off the barbershop quartet with a honey-sweet counter-tenor. Allen Gilmore cracked me up with his facial expressions and body language; he does a whale imitation in the second act that is side-splittingly funny. Liam Craig provides a potato-head base line for the madcap antics of the other actors.
This piece has the same targets as some of Bertolt Brecht’s work, but the attack is satirical, thoroughly comedic. There’s only a few didactic lines in it, delivered by Epp toward the end, and they’re short, sometimes obscene, completely adapted to the American context, and very funny, in the manner of standup comedy. Fo’s sharp pen isn’t the only talent behind this script.
This play, and several others like it, made Fo hugely popular in Italy, and earned him powerful enemies. It was clear to everyone that the piece referred to actual events, the murder of the railroad worker Guiseppe Pinelli in police custody. Fo and his family were the targets of fascist retaliation. The Reagan administration denied him a visa to visit the US in 1980. He is currently 87 years old, living in Italy. It’s a pity he could not attend this production by the Berkeley Rep. He would have been proud. The audience gave the production a well-deserved standing ovation. Go see it if you can.
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