Dario Fo has brought the theater out of the idea of an orderly, separate and respectful place of the hierarchy. With Mistero Buffo, the show that debuted at the end of the Sixties and was also censored, built a language made of dialects, grammelots, religious satire and popular tale, using the figure of the jester to speak of power, injustice and authority. The documentary Dario Fo: the last Mistero Buffo, directed by Gianluca Rame, starts from one of the last moments of that story: on August 1, 2016, in Rome, Fo is ninety years old and is about to climb on stage in front of three thousand people with one of his most famous works.
The film, produced by Clipper Media and written by Gianluca Rame with Piero D’Onofrio, will be screened on Wednesday 13 May at 8 pm at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University, as part of In Scena! The projection, in Italian with subtitles in English, takes 90 minutes. You can register here to participate. The documentary is not limited to following Fo in the backstage before entering the scene: it enlarges the story to the companies that, in different parts of the world, have continued to stage his texts, adapting them to very different political and linguistic contexts.
Among these are the Kurdish group Teatra Jiyana Nu, who in Istanbul staged Clacson, trumpets and pernacks in Kurdish, after being censored by the Turkish authorities with the accusation of terrorist propaganda; and a Buenos Aires company that reads accidental death of an anarchist from the case of Walter Bulacio, who died in 1991 after being stopped by the police. In this passage we understand why the documentary is not only the story of the last appearance of a great author: it shows how the Fo theatre has continued to work even far from Italy, every time someone used it to tell an abuse of power, censorship, a death left without justice. Meanwhile, as the moment of the entrance is approaching, Franca Rame returns, their correspondence and a shared life between stage, politics and theatrical work.
L’articolo The last <i>Mistero Buffo</i> by Dario Fo, at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò proviene da IlNewyorkese.
