September 25, 2025 : Wondercab Reprise (98A)

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

With Ren just returned from his vivid yet exhausting Texas trip (of which more anon), and Aide de Stack David off to fresh grandfatherly duties (congratulations to all concerned), we decided this week to reprise a piece from one of our earlier Substacks (#19), before many of you were even subscribers (the story had come up during some recent conversations, which is what reminded us of the Substack entry): a bit of carefree happiness from an earlier time (those comparatively halcyon days of the Reagan administration, as it happens) in the midst of all the miserable developments of our more current dispensation (of which, of course, also, more, alas, anon), courtesy of the at-the-time not-yet Nobel laureate, Italian clown and playwright Dario Fo and his actress-muse wife Franca Rame on an antic Broadway blitz.

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REPRISE (from the Archive)

DARIO FO ON BROADWAY (1984)

This piece, slightly abridged, originally appeared as a Talk story in the December 3rd, 1984, issue of the New Yorker (which is to say 13 years before Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature). It was subsequently included as one of four Walkabouts in my 2012 collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.

“If they weren’t so late, we might have been able to get in ten, maybe even a dozen,” the producer Bernard Gersten was commenting the other Saturday afternoon as he checked his pocket watch nervously—its digital face was switching over to two twenty-seven. “As it is, we’ll be lucky to catch six.”

Broadway shows, that is—in two hours.

We were standing in Shubert Alley waiting for Dario Fo, the noted Italian playwright, whose farce Accidental Death of an Anarchist, adapted by Richard Nelson, was in previews down Forty-fourth Street, at the Belasco Theatre. Fo and his wife and frequent collaborator, the actress Franca Rame, were apparently still at lunch, but the fact that they were in New York at all was something of a breathless, last-minute plot twist.

“For several years now,” Gersten explained, “Fo has been denied a visa to come to this country.” Fo and Rame are two of several dozen world figures who have run afoul of a vaguely worded but vigorously enforced subsection of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that gives the State Department wide latitude in prohibiting entry into the United States to foreigners whose visits might be deemed detrimental, in principle, to the mental well-being of the nation (or, in practice, to the political well-being of whichever administration happened to be in charge at the moment). But Gersten explained that his own recent appeals to the State Department in the specific case of Dario Fo had been more commercial than broadly idealistic.

“Forget the free trade in ideas,” he elaborated. “We appealed on the basis of free trade, period. You see, we knew that Fo had been denied a visa twice in the last four years. So, when we applied earlier this fall for permission to bring Fo here to assist in the rehearsals for our Broadway production of Accidental Death, we appealed as businessmen: My associates and I insisted on behalf of our backers, who were bankrolling Accidental Death with a $650,000 capital investment, that, even though this might seem a paltry sum by the government’s standards, we were claiming the same rights to pursue our business—unrestrained by unwarranted, arbitrary government interference—that are enjoyed by international bankers, arms brokers, or any other buccaneers. After all, living playwrights are almost always present during the early stages of major productions of their plays, and their contributions are invariably vital to the eventual success of the production. For example, last year Arthur Miller traveled to Peking to participate in the Chinese premiere of his Death of a Salesman, and that government let him in. The Czech playwright Vaclav Havel recently tried to come to New York to assist in an Off-Broadway production of one of his plays—it turned out he wasn’t able to, though, because the Prague dictatorship wouldn’t let him leave Czechoslovakia. But here we were dealing with a case where the block was coming from our own supposedly democratic government, and this was seriously jeopardizing our investment.”

Gersten’s supply-side logic apparently worked, because early last month Dario Fo was granted a one-time visa to assist in rehearsals of his play. But now he was almost fifty minutes late for Gersten’s Broadway jaunt. “Dario and Franca are only able to stay here for five days this time; the visas came so suddenly that they couldn’t arrange for more time off from rehearsals of their current production back in Italy. But, as theater people, they were eager to see other Broadway productions. There’s no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll ever be allowed in again, so this seemed the best way of exposing them to the whole range of Broadway.” Once again, Gersten anxiously checked his pocket watch.

Finally, a taxi pulled up to the curb, and Fo, Rame, and two interpreters poured out. “Scusi,” Fo said, approaching. “Mi dispiace. Mangiavo.” He is a solidly built gentleman in his late fifties, with a peculiarly malleable face: When dour, he can affect the dignitas of a Roman Republican marble bust (high forehead, jowly cheeks), but this countenance is continually melting into antic, goofy clownishness. Rame, for her part, both projects and consciously parodies the manner—swept hair, elaborate glasses, wicked heels—of a grand Italian starlet. Gersten quickly explained the ground rules of the jaunt, and by two fifty-nine we were all striding toward the Broadhurst Theatre, with its marquee beckoning us to Death of a Salesman. “Ah,” crooned Rame. “Dusteen Hoffmannn! Oh lah.”

Inside, the theatre was dark and the audience hushed. Willy Loman was exhorting Biff, “Go to Slattery’s, Boston. Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens.” “All right, Pop.” The ensemble was meshing like jeweled clockwork. “You know sporting goods better than Spalding,” Loman was insisting. “Ask for fifteen . . . And don’t say ‘Gee.’ ‘Gee’ is a boy’s word.” None of which Fo understood (his English is at best rudimentary), and yet he stood there, the light playing across his intent face, his volubility stilled: He was totally in the play. After a few minutes, Gersten walked over, gently tapped him, breaking the trance, and gathered up the rest of us, and then we were back on the street, quickly heading around the block toward the Booth Theatre.

On the way, Rame was explaining to us, with the aid of her interpreter, that she is by nature “a shy and insecure person” but that the State Department’s repeated visa denials had made her feel “more secure, stronger.” She went on to say, “The fact that such a powerful country was scared of me made me feel better, in a way—better about my work and efforts.” Her work with Fo, principally on behalf of Italian prisoners dealing with questions of their legal representation and the conditions of their incarceration, which the two have undertaken in conjunction with an organization that is roughly the Italian equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union, appears to have been the cause of their visa troubles in the United States. Rame was just starting to describe Italian prison conditions as we strode through the doors at the Booth—all of us fell silent—and into Sunday in the Park with George. George, at work behind a painted scrim, was at the same time trying to persuade a dubious colleague to lobby his “La Grande Jatte” into the next big exhibition. The colleague presently departed, and George’s mistress entered stage right, pregnant and perturbed. She warned him that she was about to go to America. “You are complete, George,” she sang, “you are alone…Tell me not to go.” But it was we who left at that point, hurried along by Gersten. “This is fun!” Fo exclaimed as we headed for the John Golden Theatre, down the street. “Like changing channels on TV.”

Inside the Golden, the cast of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross was embroiled in high dramatics and gutter slurs: What are the police doing here? Slight burglary last night. Your check was cashed yesterday afternoon. Cashed? Yesterday afternoon? You stupid (a flood of expletives), you just cost me six thousand dollars and a Cadillac! Here, again, the audience seemed completely engrossed. The jaunt was getting to be like walking in on the middle of other people’s dreams: the vividness of their experience, the raptness of their attention, a veritable monadology of reverie. We were once more out on the street.

Three thirty-eight. Intermission was just concluding across the way at Michael Bennett’s Dreamgirls, and we joined the late stragglers as they drifted back into the Imperial Theatre. While we waited for the lights to dim, we asked Fo whether the Italians ever denied entry visas to American writers—and, for that matter, whether in Italy the concept of “un-Italian” existed the way “un-American” does here, as a potent moving force.

“Ah, no,” Fo replied, through his interpreter, laughing. “You don’t understand. We are just the periphery, and the periphery cannot stay the desires of the Empire.” He continued, “Once, long ago, we were the capital of an empire. In the second century AD, a poet from Syria named Luciano di Samosata came to live in Rome and started to complain about things. He had to be taken aside and informed, ‘Remember, you are in the heart of the Empire, and you will always be a poet of the periphery.’ In many ways, America today reminds me of Rome in the second century—its highest point of economic and territorial expansion but at the same time its highest point of cultural isolation. A curious combination.”

As if on cue, the theater darkened and suddenly—wham! bam!—Las Vegas. Horn jabs, drum snares, the glitz and glitter of a lavish stage show: chorus boys and strutting women, sleek black figures swathed in sequins, entire staircases gliding silently by. “Ah!” Fo exclaimed enthusiastically, back on the street a few minutes later, as Gersten rushed us along. “Such a high level of professionalism, the pacing so exact, everything so clean! Musicals hardly ever succeed in Italy, and it’s too bad. They’re wonderful.”

Diagonally back across Forty-fifth Street, we barged into Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Jeremy Irons was visiting his former wife, Christine Baranski: “What you should have said is, ‘Duragel; no wonder the bristles fell out of my toothbrush!’” “It’s no trick loving someone at their best, the trick is loving them at their worst.” Irons moved toward the door—“Henry, you still have your virginity to lose”—and exited stage right. And now the entire stage began to rotate counterclockwise on a huge hidden turntable, seamlessly revealing the set for the next episode, a process repeated a few moments later for another scene change. It occurred to me that Irons and company were going to have to be exceedingly careful backstage not to rotate themselves right into the last scenes of Death of a Salesman, which, I realized, were simultaneously being played just beyond the wall before us. Indeed, I was visited by this sudden sense of the entire block between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth, Broadway and Eighth Avenue, with thousands of people divvied up into seven or eight discrete halls, in many cases facing each other—audiences separated by a thin double membrane of the sheerest contrivance. For a moment, I visioned some god coming down and simply filleting the block of this double spine: The audience at Sundays would be left staring at the group assembled for A Chorus Line; the throng at The Real Thing would find itself gaping across the ravine at Willy Loman’s brood.

But before I’d had much time to play out this fantasy, we were once again interrupted by Gersten. “It’s three fifty-five,” he said. “We’ve only got a few minutes to make it to the finale of Chorus Line.” We veered around the corner, heading toward the Shubert, and then noticed that Dario Fo himself had disappeared. Gersten turned back in exasperation. What had happened? A few dozen yards back, Fo was surrounded by, of all things, autograph-seekers—bungling extras, loose cannons, as far as Gersten’s script was concerned. The producer rushed back, apologized to the fans, and retrieved his tardy ward. We all entered the Shubert just as one actress was kissing today goodbye and pointing herself toward tomorrow, and already the entire company was being lined up so that a magnified voice from the audience could single out the audition’s winners and losers. The audience was hushed as the choices were revealed: a tide of saddened disappointment, a countertide of excited satisfaction, and then—magic!—the entire company was back, transformed, all spangly and decked out, vaulting into the rousing finale. Fo and Rame soaked it in, smiling broadly. The curtain descended: four eleven. The jaunt was finished.

“Marvelous!” Fo exulted, through his interpreter, when we reached the street. “So exciting. The most impressive thing about your theater here is how it is rooted in reality, in the actual world of experience. This is something we often miss in Europe. I am a surrealist, but even the madcap must start out from the real.”

I asked Fo whether this fast tour had whetted his appetite—whether he’d like to come back to New York someday, visa permitting, and see some of these plays all the way through.

“Ah, si,” he exclaimed, not even waiting for his interpreter. “Si, si!”

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A PROPOSAL BY WAY OF A POSTSCRIPT TO THE FOREGOING

Another Broadway visit the other evening, this time to A Strange Loop just a few nights before the play netted a well-deserved Tony for the year’s best musical, put me in mind of that Dario Fo jaunt almost forty years ago now, but also of an impossible scheme I’d harbored for a while several years after that. In 2002, Aleksander Sokurov premiered his drop-jawed astonishing Russian Ark (a single extended Steady-Cam take, ninety-six minutes long, deploying 2,000 actors following hundreds of days of rehearsals, gliding through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage Museum and three hundred years of Russian history to the accompaniment of three separate orchestras) (just watch it if you haven’t ever!). And I began mulling on how wonderful it could be to lavish a similar sort of regard (which is to say one in the Gersten-Fo spirit) across any single evening on Broadway, to meander freely in and out between shows, in real time—this time, however, not entering through the front lobbies but rather meandering backstage through the intervening alleyways, the throughlines of that double spine of sheerest contrivance. The camera could float down the darkened back-alleys, past lolling extras and scampering rats, piercing through back doors and hallways to vantages at the back of stages, peering past the out-of-focus actors in the foreground as they shuffled through their paces, at the faces of the rapt hushed audience beyond, one face and then the next and then the next, and then disengaging, moving back through the narrow hallways past the dressing rooms and costume racks and the struck flats out into the alley once again, and across, into another theater, where another audience would swim into view, this one perhaps exploding in laughter and subsiding in smiles, and back out again, and so forth. For, yeah, say an hour and a half, down one alley and then past the milling crowds hustling and choked traffic blaring along the perpendicular avenues, into the next alley over, and more of the same. A few years after that fantasy of mine, Alejandro Iñárritu attempted something of the same effect in his Academy Award winning Birdman, though in that fictional film, the continuous steady cam vantage was on the progressively unraveling lead actor Michael Keaton: this would be different, the focus would be on the anonymous faces in the audience, their hush, their focus, the pillows of air lodged in their throats, their giving-over of themselves, their otherworldly completely unself-conscious visages, lost in the dream.

Of course, this could never ever happen for real. The unions would never permit it, and even if they did the lawyers would smother the idea at conception (however could we ever secure all those stray releases?). But Kafkalike (and how Kafka did love his movies), I sit by my window as evening falls and conjure it all into being through my mind’s projector onto my inner skull’s flickering concave IMAX screen.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford.

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