THEATER; Painting as He Writes, With a Love of Paradox
By RON JENKINS
Published: July 11, 1999
MILAN, Italy— AS a writer, I'm an amateur,'' declares the Italian playwright Dario Fo with a sly deadpan that leaves his listeners waiting for a punch line. ''But as a painter, I'm professional. Fellini was the opposite: a professional in the cinema and an amateur painter. He's not in my league.''
The audience smiles at a Nobel Laureate in literature referring to himself as an amateur writer while mocking the drafting abilities of Italy's most acclaimed filmmaker. But Mr. Fo's skills in the visual arts are not easy to laugh off. He is speaking to critics and reporters in a Milan gallery whose walls are animated by hundreds of his designs executed on paper, tapestries and life-size mannequins. Their visual exuberance is based on the same subversive love of paradox that infuses the texts of his plays.
Mr. Fo's banter with the press is equally playful and revealing. At the inauguration of the exhibit, entitled ''Designs of Genius: Fellini and Fo'' (through Sept. 15 at the Mazzotta Foundation Galleries in the center of the city), the rubber-faced playwright refuses to conduct a traditional sit-down press conference. Instead, he leads the audience on a tour of his works, providing a running commentary that shifts effortlessly from the ridiculous to the divine.
Like the fluid figures in his paintings, Mr. Fo, 73, conveys the illusion of perpetual motion. There is barely time to take in his remarks about his painting of an orgy, based on a series of 15th-century nudes (''The originals were much more modest in their behavior''), before he has glided on. He passes a devil-horned harlequin puppet from one of his plays and begins a retelling of the story of the Virgin Mary next to a reproduction he conceived to show the Holy Virgin as she might have been viewed by a medieval peasant. (''Religious paintings like these were devised to teach the Bible to the vast majority of churchgoers who didn't know how to read.'')
Inviting his audience to take a tactile approach, Mr. Fo encourages them to feel the stiffening effects of the glue in a wall-size tapestry he designed as the backdrop for his play ''Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman,'' about the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare. Then he stops before a canvas of angels to explain how he painted it with the ink of a squid.
Many of the paintings are dedicated to Mr. Fo's wife and theatrical collaborator, Franca Rame. Standing beside a life-size portrait of Ms. Rame, Mr. Fo asserts that the exhibit and his life's work would not have been possible without her. Ms. Rame, the family archivist, cheerfully agrees: ''Everything you see in this room is here in spite of Dario. He never saves anything.''
Noticing that a priest has joined the group, Mr. Fo makes a point of explaining to him the significance of a series of paintings called ''The Peasant's Bible.'' Mr. Fo's plays have been criticized repeatedly by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church; indeed, the Vatican issued a statement expressing dismay when he won the Nobel Prize in 1997. But Mr. Fo uses his encounter with the priest, the Rev. Piero Barberi, to express his respect for the religious beliefs of common people as something entirely separate from his satires of the church and its officials.
The cleric stiffens when Mr. Fo notes that his nude portrait of Mary Magdalene expresses the reverence with which peasants viewed her during the Middle Ages, but by the end of the chat, Father Barberi seems to have been won over by Mr. Fo's discourse on the first uses of Crucifixion imagery in medieval paintings. ''You're very well prepared,'' says the priest, who turns out to be a professor of theology at the Catholic University in Milan. ''I didn't know that.''
Mr. Fo's paintings of ''The Peasant's Bible'' are a reminder that inspiration for much of his theater comes from itinerant medieval storytellers called ''giullari.'' His interest in the social and political contexts of religious art led him to write his most well-known play, ''Mistero Buffo'' (1969). It is a reinterpretation of the Bible, consisting primarily of satirical monologues, first performed by the author himself in the style of a modern-day giullare.
''You can see the rhythm of Fo's theater in the shapes of his designs,'' says Marisa Pizza, the author of a recent scholarly study of Mr. Fo, published in Italy. ''His plays are written in pictographic language, and his paintings are full of corporal action.''
The cinematic aspects of his theater work, as well, are often rooted in the physical images in his writing. For example, his monologue on the resurrection of Lazarus is structured so that one actor portrays more than a dozen characters. The miracle is from the points of view of peasants, peddlers, Apostles and the cadaver itself, shaking off worms as it rises from the tomb.
This montage technique is based on the use of perspective in the religious frescoes that Mr. Fo studied while earning his degree in architecture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. He sees medieval and Renaissance painters as master storytellers who use jump-cuts, close-ups and reverse angles to make the Bible come alive.