Monday, April 24
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Conversation + 2:00pm Screenings
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Join us for a day celebrating the legacy of Dario Fo with Robert Brustein, the legendary founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T) and Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Afternoon screenings curated by Rossella Menna.
Additional support from Rossella Menna (Dramaturg, performing arts curator), and Mariateresa Pizza (Director, Franca Rame Dario Fo Archive/Rome); the Italian Playwrights Project, Valeria Orani and The Italian Cultural Institute, Giorgio Van Straten.
The Segal Center honored Franca Rame in 2013 after her passing.
Same Day Afternoon screenings:
2:00pm Mistero Buffo Part 1 (Palazzina Liberty, 1977)
– subtitled English 60 min excerpt
3:00pm Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Teatro Cristallo, Milano 1987) – subtitled English 60 min excerpt
4:00pm The Theatre of Dario Fo (documentary, 1984) – in English 50 min
5:00pm Dario Fo and Franca Rame: A Nobel for Two (documentary, 1998) in English 55 min Directed by Lorena Luciano & Filippo Piscopo
Awarded the coveted National Medal for the Arts in 2011 by President Obama, Robert Brustein—a veteran of World War II—has been a playwright, critic, teacher, actor, director, and founder of
two major repertory theatre companies, the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard. Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University, he is a former Professor of English at Harvard University (now Senior Research Fellow), and New Republic Theatre Critic for over forty years. He now writes regularly for the Huffington Post, and teaches Dramaturgy students at the Drama School. He was Dean of the Yale School of Drama for thirteen years, where he also founded Yale Theatre magazine and the Yale Cabaret. He served for 20 years as Director of the Loeb Drama Center where he founded the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard.
Dario Fo (24 March 1926 – 13 October 2016) was an Italian actor-playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, painter, political campaigner for the Italian left-wing and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fo’s plays, in a hybrid Brechtian tradition, have been translated into 30 languages, and he was considered the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre. Much of Fo’s dramatic work, co-created with his partner Franca Rame (18 July 1929 – 29 May 2013), depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of “illegitimate” forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell’arte.
His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Chile, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the UK[6] and Yugoslavia. His work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology and war. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s included the banks amid the European sovereign-debt crisis.
Fo’s solo pièce célèbre, titled Mistero Buffo and performed across Europe, Canada and Latin America over a 30-year period, is recognised as one of the most controversial and popular spectacles in postwar European theatre. The play has been denounced by by Cardinal Ugo Poletti from the Vatican as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television”. Fo considered himseld an atheist. The 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature marked the “international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre”. The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. Dario Fo owned and operated his own theatre company.
