First staged in 1970, "Anarchist" was Fo's remarkably immediate response to the 1969 death of an anarchist who "fell" from a police station window while being interrogated as a suspect in the bombing of a bank in Milan, killing 16 people. In what Fo called a "tragic farce," a Maniac (Epp in the role Fo wrote for himself), arrested for fraud, becomes an avenging investigator in the same station, exposing police brutality, corruption and widespread collusion with the neo-fascist gangs responsible for a plague of such bombings in Italy at the time. Bayes and his terrific actors have adapted, updated and Americanized Gavin Richards' 1979 British adaptation (from Gillian Hanna's translation), filling it with current pop culture lampoons and gibes at everything from "Bush-Cheney" waterboarding to Berkeley self-righteousness. Stage stereotypes abound, from Jesse J. Perez's song-and-dance mafioso Inspector Bertozzo to Allen Gilmore's hilarious black-sidekick-like standup comic Inspector Pissani and Liam Craig's homicidal Superintendent. Bayes and Epp build on Fo's conceit that Maniac suffers from "histrionic mania" - an uncontrollable urge to act many parts - to create an extended tour de farce of instant thumbnail characterizations.
Reported by SFGate 9 hours ago.
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