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Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo

by Dario Fo & Franca Rame
review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly November 18, 1998

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Three Women

Last year’s Nobel Prize in literature started a flurry of local Dario

Fo revivals that still hasn’t blown over. Since March I’ve seen “A
Woman Alone” three times. Two of those versions are still
running. Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo is a collection
of Fo sketches written for a woman to perform, alone, in about
five hours. Right now you can choose between two different
chunks of it, either by Francesca Fanti or Shelley Mitchell --
different, of course, except for “A Woman Alone,” which is too
perfect a cartoon of an oppressed housewife not to be de rigueur.
I won’t say which is better. Fanti was reviewed well in this space
in September, and she has the advantages of a native Roman
accent and a young Italian temperament, but Shelley Mitchell is not
to be disregarded.

The “Freak Mommy” sketch features a woman dressed as a
Gypsy who comes to a Milan cathedral, apparently for confession,
and tells her story to a priest. After spending time as a
Marxist-Leninist, running from the cops in the student
demonstrations of ’68, and a long excursion away from her
husband and son, she’s returned to Milan to find herself wanted by
the local police. Mitchell begins this sketch in an unnaturally low
voice but finds a groove for the character that lets her slough off
this affectation, and the woman’s outrage starts to cook, making
what would otherwise be undramatic narrating a lot of fun. Telling
about her son getting beaten by a cop during the ’68
demonstration, and about why she interfered, she describes how
much work went into making her son a human being. “And that
cop was going to break it all up in five minutes? No-o. ’Scuse
me.” Mitchell is best when she manages to work herself into a
high Italian dudgeon.

“Dialogue for a Single Voice” is adapted from a centuries-old folk
tale that “slipped through Boccaccio’s fingers,” according to an
author’s note. It’s about a young woman inviting her boyfriend to
her room with the warning that if her father wakes up he’ll cut off
the boy’s balls with an ax. The boyfriend, forced to be quiet and
slow, gives the woman an orgasm that would make Meg Ryan
jealous. It’s a sweet, simple, almost unpolitical tale, and Mitchell
delivers it not just with convincingly ravished gasps but also a
chiding, pettish voice. It works well.

“A Woman Alone” is about a housewife imprisoned by her
husband in their apartment for cheating. She relates her story to
the audience under the pretext of talking through her window to a
woman across the street. Meanwhile the phone rings, her baby
cries, and her lecherous brother-in-law -- who’s missing an arm
and a tongue because of an unfortunate accident -- keeps honking
his horn. This is Mitchell’s strongest piece; she seems most
comfortable in the voice of the housewife, and even if she doesn’t
milk the monologue for laughs as energetically as she could, her
attention to character never flags, and you come away from
Orgasmo’s comedy with a sense of three real Italian women,
shaded and distinct.

— Michael Scott Moore

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