Theater Review - Bible study

Peasant’s Bible is no testament to playwright’s appeal

Dario Fo’s play The Peasant’s Bible turns 7 Stages theater into an impious, at times potty-mouthed Sunday School class. The Italian Nobel laureate reveals a skewed attitude toward organized religion via four earthy Bible stories and parables meant to offer a working-class perspective on the Scriptures.
Staging the world premiere of a Dario Fo play, directed by his American translator Ron Jenkins, is unquestionably a feather in 7 Stages’ cap. But the thinness of the play’s jokes and its ideas leave you puzzled as to what makes Fo reportedly the world’s most-produced living playwright.

Zishan Ugurlu, an actress-in-residence at New York’s famed La Mama theater, performs the evening’s four tales very much in the style of a children’s storyteller, with expansive gestures, drawn-out enunciation and silly sound effects such as pigs snorting. She stands before a backdrop of watercolors (reproductions of Fo’s own work) that blend Christian iconography with pagan symbolism. And she almost winkingly intones Gregorian chants between stories.

The Peasant’s Bible begins with a goof on the book of Genesis. God creates the first two human beings by hatching them from a giant egg “underneath the sacred derriere.” Speaking in the voice of Eve, Ugurlu relates how the couple discovers sexual intercourse when they decide to put Adam’s rebellious “devil” into the heat of Eve’s “hell.”

The play also makes sport of Aesop-style fables, as in the second story, when a pair of filthy pigs get the opportunity to fly to heaven: The swine themselves appreciate the Icarus reference. Fo’s descriptions of acting like a horny hog in paradise provide the play’s most oddly lyrical moments. In the third tale, a lonely dung beetle — whose work song sounds like something Björk would sing — seeks revenge against a cruel eagle and asks the advice of the cruciform Christ (who flies away “like a wooden bird”).

The last tale has the Madonna in Italy trying to return to the Holy Land in time for the nativity. One of the play’s funniest jokes has Ugurlu riffing on the notion of Jesus being born in Naples and crooning the word of God to the tune of “Volare.” The Madonna falls in with two would-be swindlers who offer to deliver her to “Palestine,” but who merely plan to rob her.

At times, The Peasant’s Bible relies on humor that lacks logic. When the scoundrels have bad luck, they make exclamations like “Holy Mother of God!” to which she replies “Me?” But why would they be taking her name in vain before Jesus has been born? You can either attribute it to the playwright’s gift for nonsense or sheer sloppiness. Certainly the last story builds to a punch line so lame that you leave the theater feeling completely disgruntled.

Some of Fo’s jokes are profane without being profound, as when Eve first notices her breasts and asks why God put two buttocks on her chest. The Peasant’s Bible brands God a misogynist, celebrates the lowly creatures that dwell with manure, and defends the pleasures of the flesh against the repressive forces of the church. The play’s ideas tend to be accessible but facile, and, combined with Ugurlu’s relentlessly upbeat delivery, you feel nothing so much as condescension.

For all of his global acclaim, Fo has yet to hit home in Atlanta. The Peasant’s Bible offers no confirmation of the writer’s popularity, and nor did the Fo shows of the late 1990s, Abducting Hilary at Horizon Theatre and Archangels Don’t Play Pinball at Dad’s Garage. That Fo received the Nobel Prize for Literature over many more worthy playwrights (Athol Fugard comes to mind) suggests that his win was more due to his leftist politics — or perhaps divine intervention.
curt.holman@creativeloafing.com