Review: Commedia dell'Arte Meets Political Farce at Portland Stage

Portland Stage closes its season with Dario Fo's 1974 play, They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay!, in the playwright's signature style of provocative socialist politics and broad Commedia dell'Arte farce. Translated from the Italian by Jon Laskin and Michael Aquilante, the Portland production adds an Americanized layer of iconic comedy characters and references to shows such as the Honeymooners. The overall effect alternates between moments of hilarity and wearisome intervals, though one can only admire the virtuoso performances of the entire cast and director Ron Botting's crisp, energetic production.

No doubt, the difficulties lie in Fo's play itself, whose confrontational style and message were seen as revolutionary in their decade of violent upheaval, but somehow despite Portland Stage's efforts to make this contemporary, often seem as trying as the rhetoric of our current Presidential election. Fo's characters are meant to be stereotypes in the Commedia dell'Arte tradition, broadly farcical incarnations of proletarian everymen, and much of the humor comes from the quasi-improvised athleticism of their physical comedy and the predictability of the situations.

In bringing this aspect of the play to life, director Botting and his excellent cast succeed remarkably well, managing to mitigate the two-hour-twenty-minute running time with their almost breathlessly fast-paced antics. Botting also is skillful in giving the actors just the right amount of room to create their own gags and run with them, and he captures the spirit of this type of comedy by having actors use not only the stage, but also the aisles and other parts of the house.

Emma O'Donnell outdoes herself as the wily Antonia, whose shrewd and quick-thinking inventiveness steer the play through its comic twists and turns. O'Donnell is verbally agile and physically limber and sparks the pace of the play. As her somewhat dim husband Giovanni, William Zielinski makes an excellent foil - stolid, obtuse, and just buffoonish enough. As the second couple Margherita and Luigi, Kimbre Lancaster and Timothy Hassler provide the counterpoint with Lancaster playing the foolish blonde and Hassler an especially mercurial young husband in the vein of the Commedia's Truffaldino or Pulchinella. (His curtain speech where he plays the Pope is also a delightfully amusing touch.) Jeffrey M. Bender rounds out the cast in several well-etched roles, the funniest of which is his Damon Runyanesque federal detective.

Anita Stewart supplies the atmospheric set - a three-story gray evocation of cheap post-war worker housing with wash hanging from the lines and shabby furniture, and Gregg Carville enhances the ambiance with his lighting design. Kathleen Brown's simple, drab costumes in a similar gray-blue palette add to the effect, as does Ian Sturges Miliken's sound design with its period Italian pop music and special effects for the rioting and general hubbub

They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay! Is a play whose style is rooted in two other eras, and while Portland Stage's tackling of the political rhetoric is earnest, its creation of the Commedia antics is rousing.

Photos courtesy Portland Stage, photographer Aaron Flacke

They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay! Runs from April 26 - May 22, 2016 at Portland Stage, 25 Forest Ave., Portland, ME 207-774-0465 www.portlandstage.org