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PARTISAN REVIEW
subjected to provocation and persecution of all kinds, sometimes
more grotesque and comical in their repressive stupidity than the
very farce we were performing."
Evidently the United States Department of State wanted to
playa role in this continuing farce. The official reasons it offered
for Fo and Rame's visa denial in 1980 had to do with their member–
ship in Soccorso Rosso (Red Aid), a group slightly to the left of
Amnesty International. Their legal aid for political prisoners in Italy
hardly amounts to the support of terrorism of which the State
Department accused them. Fo may be a heterodox Marxist, but he
is not an advocate of terrorist violence or kidnapping; he condemns
and ridicules such actions in his plays. Admittedly, his reasons for
opposing terrorist violence are not the same as the State Depart–
ment's; he objects to terrorism because it serves the state, providing
the government with an excuse to increase its repression and control
over dissenters.
The folly of terrorism is one subject of Fo's recent play,
Klaxon,
Trumpets and Raspberries
(1981) . A terrorist failure to kidnap Fiat
owner Gianni Agnelli results in a grotesque farce of mistaken iden–
tities and Keystone Kops routines. Agnelli is rescued from a burning
car by one of his workers, Antonio, but his face is disfigured and his
memory is temporarily lost. Hospital surgeons remodel their
unknown patient's face to match a photograph of Antonio, who has
fled for fear of arrest. When Agnelli leaves the hospital, Antonio's
wife assumes the recuperating amnesiac is her husband and takes
him home. For a time Agnelli lives a worker's life, complete with ex–
posure to assembly line work and police surveillance.
In
Milan,
Dario Fo played the roles of both Agnelli and Antonio, a virtuoso
doubling which suggested that if not for their faces, their property,
and armed force, all men might be equal.
Fo's decision to portray a wealthy industrialist and one of his
workers in this play is symptomatic of a comic, consciously practiced
schizophrenia that pervades his satire. He embraces class enemies as
collaborators in farce, presses them into his service, impersonates
them, and articulates their contradictory roles with immense humor.
In
Accidental Death of an Anarchist,
one of his most frequently produced
plays, Fo himself performed the roles of maniac, police inspector,
high court judge, and bishop. He kept disowning or temporarily ex–
changing one persona for another, so that the maniac's opening con-
