We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!

A side-splitting satire! With the price of groceries rising every day, what’s a poor girl to do? Stuff bags of food up her sweater and pretend to be pregnant, of course! Laughs are on special when 1997 Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo opens the can on shoplifting. In a new translation by Fo’s close collaborator Ron Jenkins, We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! is a side-splitting satire that’ll have you rolling in the (grocery) aisles. A.R.T.’s Lord of Laughter, Andrei Belgrader, is the director.

Program Notes: The Comedy of Hunger
by Ron Jenkins

Hunger is a recurring theme in the comedies of Dario Fo. His characters are not just hungry for food. They are hungry for dignity, hungry for justice, and hungry for love. The protagonists of We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! are driven by their collective hungers to break free from the constraints in which their poverty has confined them. Their initial challenge to the laws of the “free market” propels them into a comic defiance of the laws of human reproduction. Men get pregnant, women give birth to cabbages, and amniotic fluid becomes the source of a gourmet meal. The mechanisms of farce become metaphors for liberation. Slapstick confusion begets new ways of understanding the world.

Although they inhabit a world of spiraling absurdity, Fo’s characters are as real as their hunger. A few months after the play’s 1974 premiere in Italy several women were arrested for “liberating” food from supermarkets in much the same manner as depicted in We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! The prosecuting attorneys tried to draw Fo into the trial as an accessory for inciting the crime, but the judge overruled the suggestion, apparently agreeing with the writer, who claims that his plays are nothing more than “documentary reflections of a world in which reality has become its own satire.”

We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! has been staged in over thirty countries around the world. “It is a mistake,” says Fo, “to dismiss these people as crazy Italian caricatures who speak in phony accents, sing corny love songs, and eat pasta on red and white checkered tablecloths. The stereotypes that foreigners have of Italians are full of clichés that keep us at a distance and prevent a genuine understanding of the problems we all share in common.” Like Chaplin’s tramp reduced to eating his shoe in The Gold Rush, Fo’s clowns suffer from hungers with which everyone can identify. Samuel Beckett wrote that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” In the comedies of Dario Fo, the same might be said of starvation.