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people become interchangeable in their mass body . Fo becomes a
one-man carnival, and amply represents the collectivity, in one
scene in
Mistera Buffo
where he portrays fifteen different characters
by himself; they are the spectators watching the miracle of Lazarus's
resurrection, and through gestures alone, Fo expresses their varied
responses to the event. Fo's ability to perform crowd scenes solo
may be one reason that French critic Bernard Dort praised the
"ubiquity" of this "epic actor." Writing about Fo's performance in
Mistera Buffo,
Dort regarded it as the opposite of a personal display;
Fo was not on stage to show himself, but rather to show many
others .
The ubiquitous acting style is also evident in Fo's playwriting,
where characters alter society, at least temporarily, by transforming
themselves and creating new personae. Given the proper words and
gestures, Fo's characters can change from factory owners into fac–
tory workers, and from policemen into anarchists. The first act of
Accidental Death
ends with the police singing a favorite hymn of anar–
chists, because the buffoon convinces them it will make them look
more human and sympathetic to the public. "I beg of you! For your
own good .. . so the investigation will turn out in your favor.
Sing!" And they sing:
The whole world is our homeland.
Our law is liberty.
And through our thought
This world of ours shall finally be free.
The grotesquery of the situations in which Fo's characters find
themselves is almost Rabelaisian. Bakhtin noted that in Rabelais's
world, the grotesque "discloses the potentiality of an entirely dif–
ferent world, of another way of life . . . a return to Saturn's golden
age . .. [requiring] bodily participation in the potentiality of another
world." The policemen who sing an anarchist song briefly enter
another world - that of their victim. But far more grotesque
transformations occur in other scenes by Fo. A police officer appears
to experience an hysterical pregnancy in
We Can't Pay, We Won't
Payi.
In the same play several women stuff boxes of pasta and
vegetables under their coats, so that they look pregnant; their
husbands almost instantly accept the roles of worried, expectant
fathers . The play is based on actual events in Milan, where massive
