Curse you, Dario Fo

One of the banes of my existence this past four months or so has been the world of Italian theatre. Not that it's necessarily bad, but my professor has strange and unpredictable taste in plays, so it's always a gamble when you go to open a new reading assignment. Two of our last plays were by the same author, and the first one, while not spectacular, was pretty ok. Not hideously vulgar (like some plays we've had to read), kind of funny (it describes the Pope blessing people he passes while downhill skiing), it is one of my more favorite plays from the semester. All jazzed up from the first one, I move right along into the second, expecting more of the same. I could tell from the style that it was definately the same guy writing, but somehow it just wasn't funny. The play didn't seem to go anywhere, there were several dumb false endings that a six-year old could have come up with, and the final real ending was hopelessly cheesy, and not in a good way. I kept waiting for the play to hit its stride, to start being entertaining, but it just slogged its way through to the end, remarkably unfunny the whole way through.

Although we don't have any other plays assigned to us by this author, I almost feel compelled to read just one more, as a sort of tie-breaker, to see which play was more reflective of his work as a whole, and which play was the accident. But that will wait until perhaps the end of the semester.