STAGE REVIEW : THE RAME & FO SHOWS: POLITICS DELL’ARTE

After controversial Italian actress-author Franca Rame discovered that the Maryland state motto was “Manly deeds, womanly words,” she turned to her Peabody Concert Hall audience, cast an amused glance around the hall and said, “Women, you have to do something about that!”

It was one of the mildest political rebukes heard last week in an afternoon performance full of strong language and strong opinion coated sometimes--though not always--with the tempering effects of satire.

Like her husband, Dario Fo, who performed the previous evening (both were in town for the Theatre of Nations), Rame is an artist for whom the theater is political platform first and entertainment second, though the two impulses have been merged for so long that they’ve become inseparable.

In Italy, this political emphasis has brought them enormous popularity with audiences and notorious diffidence from a government that can’t quite take the constant heat. It also caused the U.S. State Department (at the Italian government’s request) twice to refuse Fo and Rame entrance into this country, provoking storms of indignation. In 1984 it finally relented, allowing Fo to visit New York before the Broadway opening of “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” But the recent stop in Baltimore was the final one on Fo and Rame’s first, long overdue performance mini-tour of the Eastern seaboard.

On stage, Rame and Fo follow a similar pattern. Both intersperse the patter of stand-up comics with actual performance pieces. Patter and pieces have been long and carefully rehearsed, but remain flexible enough for topical insertions. This provides a forum and the opportunity to befriend and assail the audience at once, invite the public into the comic conspiracy, yet remind it, at carefully chosen moments, that the fun wells up from dark, unfunny places.

Rame’s pieces are direct, structured, lucid, even formal; Fo’s pieces ramble all over the map with such deftness and amiability that the seriousness of their impulse is all the more dazzling when it leaps from the honeyed (or bawdy or scatological) words to squirt an audience with the acid truth.

It’s a remarkable technique, applied quite differently by two strikingly individual artists who have been married for 32 years and (as witnessed when they perform together) are symbiotic in their ability to spar on stage without surrendering an ounce of individuality.

Rame, a pedigreed mountebank descended from generations of Northern Italian strolling players, is a tall, sleek, handsome woman, with legs like Betty Grable’s, a mind like Mort Sahl’s and a mouth that could compete with Richard Pryor’s. Fo--a large, laughing man of the people--has sweetness and good humor with an irresistible overbite and a body made of collapsible joints. You can always feel Rame’s anger boiling just under the serene surface; it takes infra-red light to spot Fo’s.

With Rame the politics are clear and strongly sexual, sometimes running over into a forced (and weaker) logic of their own. Her main preoccupation is with the enduring subjugation of women. She breaks the ice with an astonishing preamble in which the genitalia of men and women are carefully and subjectively analyzed, after which, as she pointed out, all verbal intimacies with an audience become possible.

Her carefully crafted monologues in a program called “Tutta Casa, Letto e Chiesa” (“It’s All Bed, Board and Church”) ran the gamut from slapstick to serious drama, the high point being “Strupo” (“Rape”), a woman’s stream-of-consciousness responses--blow by blow--as she is being violated and otherwise abused by three men at once. The low point came with a “Medea” in which Rame interprets the assassination of Medea’s children as the ultimate blow to be struck for feminism. While theoretically possible, that viewpoint remains a forced and arguable quantum leap.

Other, lighter pieces such as “Una Donna Sola” (“A Woman Alone,” in which a housewife’s insistence that she’s happy turns into repetitive psychotic divagation) and “Il Risveglio” (“The Awakening,” about the pressures that besiege the working mother) have been seen in Los Angeles, performed in English by fussy actors with no grasp of Rame’s style. They had managed only to make the pieces look silly and overwrought. In Baltimore, with strict economy of staging, language and gesture, and the unobtrusive assistance of overtitles, Rame brings her monologues potently to life.

With Fo, oppression in general and absurdity in particular fall under the satirical knife.

In his “Mistero Buffo” (“Comic Mysteries,” taking off from the tales of troubadours or giullari who performed in the Middle Ages), Fo uses the coherent gibberish of grammelot (an invented nonsense that has become his trademark) to deftly, delicately, decimate everything in sight: hunger, hypocrisies, Italian restaurants (even those run by Swedes in black wigs), the discovery of America (bankrolled by Italian bankers), bureaucratic disinformation (there was no famine in Venice in the 16th Century; the people just hadn’t been told where to find the garbage cans) and, of course, the Pope.

As he triumphantly explains with the fluent assistance of translator Ron Jenkins (then gleefully demonstrates in Italian, in French, in English), grammelot was a device used by Moliere to elude censorship. It sounds like a language but since it cannot be understood, you can’t be sued. The logic is perfection.

Religion got Fo’s most assiduous attention, particularly the practice of selling of indulgences (“discounted pain”) and the purchasing of saints and relics. The reconstruction of a saint (whose skeleton had been broken up into hundreds of pieces and sold) revealed that he had really been a woolly mammoth. And did you know that the Italians sold Saint George and his dragon to the English--at their request? He turned out to be a Turk and the dragon a crocodile with scoliosis, but that was the Middle Ages. Things are different now.

Such lunatic uses of history with their unspoken yet unmistakable connections to the present, meld with the irrepressible clowning of Fo’s large, expressively nimble frame to goad, amuse and prick and slash. The ferocity is much more concealed than Rame’s, more subtle, but not a whit less pointed.

Fo and Rame didn’t make it to the West Coast this year (though they were invited), but it’s just a matter of time. With an International Festival looming in Los Angeles for 1987 (and the presence of Robert Fitzpatrick, the festival’s promoter, in Baltimore last week), you can start taking bets.