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PARTISAN REVIEW
"proletarian shopping" (shoplifting) began after grocery prices
skyrocketed in 1974. In Fo's satire the women try to hide their stolen
goods from husbands and policemen. The resulting farce offers a vi–
sion of urban Saturnalia, where instead of Rabelaisian monks,
pilgrims, or scholars, we see housewives, factory workers, and police
officers undergo illegal or bizarre transformations in body, and in
their relations to nature (vegetables, birth) and private property
(unaffordable groceries). Two wives choose to participate bodily in
"another world" when a policeman discovers that their bulging
bellies are actually bags of salad. Antonia and Margherita claim a
miracle has occurred. The police inspector searching for stolen
groceries has to accept their word or risk sacrilege:
Inspector:
Oh yes? The cabbage miracle. Where are the roses?
Margherita:
Who can afford roses? They're very expensive.
Antonia:
In hard times, one makes what miracles one can. With
the veg you've got handy. Anyway, miracles aren't illegal, you
know. Also, there's no law that says a person can't carry a
mixed salad on their belly.
The satire here ridicules religion in an age of consumer capitalism,
an age of democracy where "miracles" can be purchased in any
grocery store; the greatest miracle is that one can afford to pay the
bill. ln
We Can't Pay, We Won't Pay!
the humor is less exotic than,
say, the episode in Rabelais where Gargantua eats six pilgrims in a
salad because they had hidden under lettuce in a garden to escape
their enemies. Rabelais's grotesquery has given way to antic trans–
formations more suitable for an age of inflation, shoplifting, and
miracle salad dressing.
Fo's utopian satire allows us to witness small miracles, to see
policemen turn into anarchists, and unborn children turn into food;
but Fo also knows his satire cannot achieve larger miracles. One
speech in
Accidental Death oj an Anarchist
questions the play's efficacy
as social corrective, and inadvertently explains the play's success at
box offices twelve years after it was written. Having revealed Italian
political scandals, the buffoonish impostor in the play informs us
that:
The average citizen doesn't stand to gain anything from the
disappearance of dirty deals. No , he's satisfied to see them de-
