Accidental Death of
an Anarchist At the Signal Ensemble Theatre by Dan Zeff Chicago – In 1997, Italian playwright Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize
for literature. The Nobel committee citing him for “scourging authority and
upholding the downtrodden.” Fo really got his scourge out in his 1970 satire
“”Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” Fo claimed it was the most popular modern
play of its time, with productions in more than 40 countries. Fo
based “Anarchist” on a really scandal that sent Italy into an uproar in 1969
and beyond. Following a terrorist bomb that killed and injured many people in a
bank, Italian police arrested a low level anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli for
the crime. While in police custody, Pinelli allegedly either jumped or fell to
his death from a fourth floor window at the police station. The stench of
police involvement in the death was in the air, aggravated by a blatant
government cover-up. Fo
seized on the Pinelli affair to write “Anarchist,” a play that harnessed both
satire and farce to accuse the Italian government bureaucracy of corruption,
not to mention a politically inspired murder. Fo’s play demonstrated the unholy
alliance between government officials and neo-Fascist extremists who used left
wingers as fall guys.
Fo
is a cabaret artist as well as a playwright and his dramaturgy draws heavily
from the improvisational style of the Renaissance commedia dell’ arte tradition
in Italian theater. Thus, theaters are permitted to inject topical and local
references into their productions to give the show immediacy and relevance. The
Signal Ensemble Theatre is presenting an adaptation of “Anarchist” in a
translation by Jon Laskin and Michael Aquilante. The translation retains the
basic structure of Fo’s original while allowing the Signal revival to toss in
references to Facebook, tweeting, and Governor Blago among other historical links
intended to connect with today’s American audience. All
the action takes place in a police station where a loose canon known only as
the Madman (or the Maniac) is being interrogated for the minor offense of
impersonating a psychiatrist. Through an unlikely sequence of events, the
Madman takes on the identity of a visiting magistrate come to reopen the
investigation into the suspicious death of the anarchist. The Madman is crazy
like a fox, taking over the narrative to use his own interrogations to expose a
police commissioner and a couple of police inspectors as corrupt bunglers. The
chief ornament of the Ensemble revival is Joseph Stearns as the Madman, a
wildly comic character who is also Fo’s spokesman for the brutality and
deviousness he sees in the Italian government. But Fo clearly points his finger
beyond Italy to the modern human condition, with society’s powerful ruling
class victimizing the powerless underclass worldwide. When
Stearns is slashing and burning the bureaucratic class, the play is both
entertaining and stimulating, especially for liberal viewers sympathetic to
Fo’s outlook. Stearns is a dynamo, and it’s invigorating to watch his Madman
frantically thinking on his feet to sustain his disguise while ensnaring the cartoon
police officials in a net of absurd lies and machinations. Unfortunately,
much of the production relies on slapstick farce that just doesn’t work on the
Ensemble stage. The frantic physical comedy is labored to the point of embarrassment.
The actors who play the a police inspector and the commissioner work hard but
they are too young for roles that require the pompous gravity of veteran
bureaucrats fighting for their privileged lives as the Madman unravels their
desperate plots. The
best supporting performance comes from Simone Roos who appears in the second
act as a female investigative reporter. Otherwise it’s Stearns’s play. Melania
Lancy designed the effective police station interior. Jenilee Houghton designed
the costumes, Mark Hurni the lighting, and Julie Ballard the sound. Anthony
Ingram’s directing is best when he turns Stearns loose but the labored attempts
at farce drag the production down into the comic depths. “Accidental
Death of an Anarchist” runs through March 19 at the Signal theater at 1802 West
Berenice Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and
Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20. Call
773 347 1350 or visit www.signalensemble.com. The show gets a rating of 21/2 stars. Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. February 2011 Visit Dan on Facebook. 
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The Real Inspector Hound
At the Signal Ensemble Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago - Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” is a 65-minute one-act satire that skewers drama critics and the mystery melodramas typified by Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” It would be hard to find two easier targets to ridicule, but Stoppard has his fun in his own inimitable manner. The show is a continuous exercise in Stoppardian cleverness.
“The Real Inspector Hound” is the opening production by the Signal Ensemble Theatre at its new performing space. In the early 1970’s, the play was combined with a shorter Stoppard comedy called “After Magritte,” giving the customers a longer evening of theater for their ticket price. But “The Real Inspector Hound” is entertaining enough to stand on its own, without filler from a companion play.
Stoppard’s comedy starts with two newspaper critics taking their seats in a theater box before the opening of a new thriller. Stoppard starts right in mocking the critics, Birdboot and Moon, and presumably the entire profession, for their pomposity, self importance, inept literary style, vanity, intramural jealousies, and abuse of power.
Birdboot and Moon are reviewing a thriller very much like “The Mousetrap,” with its radio-broadcast rumors of a madman at loose in the neighborhood and the country house being cut off from outside help by a dense fog. Stoppard takes his pleasure with the clichés of the melodrama form before he introduces the play’s gimmick halfway through the evening. The playwright has the two critics actually entering the action of the melodrama they are reviewing, becoming characters in the plot while retaining their real-life identities.
It’s amusing stuff, particularly enjoyable for spectators (1) with a grudge against drama critics or (2) with a familiarity with the “old dark house” thriller stereotype. For audiences with insist on weightier meanings embedded within this frivolous play, Stoppard crosses the line between the real world and the artifice of the stage, touching on free will and the stagecraft of the Theater of the Absurd. And his command of the “play within a play” is ingenious.
But for most viewers, “The Real Inspector Hound” will be a larky viewing experience. Even at this early stage in his career, Stoppard was a master of language and droll wit in the service of offbeat story lines.
With all its comic merits, “The Real Inspector Hound” is still a slight work. Even at 65 minutes, the play seems about 10 minutes too long. Once the playwright establishes that this work will be a send up of “The Mousetrap” and its brethren, the show kind of runs in place until the critics enter the on-stage action.
The Signal production certainly gives the Stoppard comedy a solid reading. Director Ronan Marra has a good feel for the lampooning of the critics and “The Mousetrap,” avoiding any patronizing nudge-nudge-wink-wink superiority to the material. And the cast is excellent.
Jon Steinhagen, who is looming as an increasing important presence in Chicagoland theater, is first rate as the bombastic Birdboot. Philip Winston is likewise excellent as fellow critic Moon, eaten up with resentment at his status as second string reviewer. And I particularly liked Mary O’Dowd as the sinister housemaid in the melodrama.
The ensemble is completed by John Blick, Katie Genualdi, Meredith Bell Alvarez, and Colby Sellers as characters in the melodrama who welcome the critics into their fictional world without batting an eye.
Melania Lancy designed the effective set for the melodrama with the critics’ box at the side (do critics ever sit in boxes to review a performance in real life?). Elsa Hiltner designed the English country house style formal wardrobe. Julie Ballard designed the lighting and Anthony Ingram the sound. This is a very solid physical production, especially given the theater’s limited technical resources and playing space.
“The Real Inspector Hound” runs through September 18 at the Signal Ensemble Theatre, 1802 West Berenice Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20. Call 773 347 1350 or visit www.signalensemble.com.
The show gets a rating of three stars. August 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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