JOEL SCH ECHTER
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fession in the play might well be Dario Fo's personal testimony; he
claims to sufTer from a psychic disorder, "histromania," a compul–
sion to play multiple roles .
This disorder is not new, of course. Fo traces his performance
and playwriting styles back to the storytelling of medieval minstrels.
His characters continually tell one another stories, and impersonate
their subjects as they describe them. Besides its continuation of the
minstrel tradition , Fo sees in his theater an affinity with Brecht's epic
style ; Brecht asked actors to present roles "in the third person," nar–
rating their story at the same time they enacted it, and Fo's plays too
call for epic acting insofar as they require narrative techniques from
actors .
Discussing the connection between his work and Brecht's in a
1974 essay on popular culture, Fo noted that spectators accept the
fourth wall convention and identify with the actor's representation of
a single character in bourgeois theater. In popular and Brechtian
theater, instead of seeing isolated individuals on stage, the audience
sees a "chorality." When any role taken by an actor becomes a
pretext for his speaking of, as, and to many people, the imaginary
fourth wall , the "delegated space" between audience and actors , is
destroyed. The audience, like the actors, cannot remain isolated in–
dividuals or voyeurs under these circumstances.
As Fo's characters accumulate stories, superstitions, words , and
phrases from one another, and mimic one another in retelling stories
or events , they reveal a collective aspect of character; one character's
gestures and words are frequently stolen or learned from another.
Fo's theater further destroys the "delegated space" of actor and au–
dience in the sense that his plays resist notions of character and
language as private property . The plays portray redistribution of
property - consumer goods in
We Can't Pay,
and the intellectual
property of state secrets in
Accidental Death of an Anarchist-
a central
action which parallels the redistribution of individual characters'
language and gestures .
Invention of an alibi by the police in
Accidental Death of an Anar–
chist
becomes a collective act of character creation; the story of the
anarchist's death is retold and reenacted many times with variation
by men at a Milan police station. The play, written in 1970, is based
on an actual occurrence in which an Italian anarchist accused of ter–
rorism was said to have jumped to his death from the fourth floor of
