“Can’t Pay? Won't Pay!” by Dario Fo

The Playwright & the Play

Dario Fo (March 24, 1926 – October 13, 2016) was an Italian playwright, theater director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, which marked the “international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre.” His play Can’t Pay? Won't Pay! is set in an economically depressed working class neighborhood (located in Greece, in our production) where food prices are skyrocketing. People are resorting to eating “rabbit heads,” “Millet for Birds,” and succulent “Super-meat Dog Food” instead of their usual gastronomical fare. The very funny physical farce gets rolling when Antonia tries to hide the fact that she smuggled food out of a supermarket during a food riot from her husband Giovanni, who would rather “starve than eat stolen food.” In the ensuing complications, which include the appearance of a buffoonish police detective hot on the trail of “food thieves,” Antonia’s friend Margherita is forced to feign pregnancy (hiding the stolen food up her dress) and inadvertently winds up being taken to the hospital to “deliver” a bag of leaking olives!