STAGE REVIEW : ‘ELISABETH’ A SLICE OF FO WITH AMERICAN TWIST

In the commedia dell ‘arte tradition, Dario Fo doesn’t so much write plays as jot down sailing orders for them, to be filled out in front of an audience that shares the body language of the players. The joke isn’t just the words, but the half-wink and the jerk of the thumb.

Fo’s scripts tend to lose their joy when performed by American actors, and “Elisabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center is no exception, even with an Italian director, Arturo Corso.

By coincidence a company from the Teatro di Roma was in town over the weekend, doing a commedia-based play, “Pulcinella,” at the Japan America Theatre. There you saw a nimbleness of attack that would have made LATC’s “Elisabeth” much more fun to watch and wouldn’t have distracted from the message.

It is not much of a message: something about how absolute power can drive a ruler crazy, particularly if she is a woman and already behind society’s eight ball. The real Queen Elizabeth seems to have coped with job stress pretty well, but Fo’s Elisabeth is as batty as Norma Desmond by the end of the play and clearly on the way to it at the beginning.

Is this funny? It could be, in a really outrageous production. Tallulah Bankhead could have played Fo’s Elisabeth. Charles Ludlam could have. Sarah Bernhardt could have. In fact some of the scenes suggest Bernhardt’s hilariously awful silent-screen impersonation of Elizabeth, where she keeps beating her breast and collapsing on pillows.

Barbara Sohmers, LATC’s Elisabeth, works hard to seem eccentric and off-the-wall, but underneath we sense a measured, well-ordered person who would no more keep a horse in her bedroom than Kate Hepburn would--or even the statue of a horse.

Sohmers grows stronger as the play grows darker, and Elisabeth gets to make some decisions, however paranoid. But the first act comes across as an exceptionally unfunny vaudeville between a not-very-batty batty queen and her not-particularly-comic servants.

One of the servants, a bustling lady called Mama Big Big, is played by Shabaka, a.k.a. Barry Henley. This was apparently Fo’s part in the original, and it looks like sharp casting. We know how funny Shabaka can be from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “Factwino” series, where he played a half-looped superhero in a baggy pair of long-johns.

But put him in skirts, and the fun goes out of him. Or maybe the problem is that director Corso tries to impose Italian shtick on him, rather than giving him the freedom that a commedia clown would have to work out his own shtick. Anyway, it ain’t him.

Gisela Caldwell has no such problem as the cynical maidservant, Martha. She has the quick, merry attack of the Teatro di Roma actors, without being any the less American. But the part isn’t that juicy, and she’s too loyal to overstep it. One-third of an ensemble is better than none at all, or is it?

“Elisabeth” does get some titters, as we pick up on phrases as current as the Iran- contra hearings. The Virgin Queen, too, has a lieutenant who wants to provide her with deniability (Tony Travis).

It’s also interesting to consider her case against Shakespeare for having attacked her--in, of all plays, “Hamlet.” Fo’s point here is the paranoia that goes with high office, but Elisabeth’s argument does make a specious kind of sense, as the arguments of paranoia often do. It’s certainly another way of thinking about “Hamlet.”

Fo being a feminist, the play also presumably has that component, although I had a hard time finding it here. Indeed, it almost seems to take a traditional male position that females take everything too personally to be entrusted with power. This is clever, though: “What a devious mind! She thinks like a man!”

The physical production, apparently on orders from Fo, isn’t rough-and-ready. It’s elegant, particularly Noel Taylor’s costumes, suggesting the velvets and the laces of Holbein’s portraits. We note the contrast with the earthiness of the court’s language, a point also made by Mark Twain in “1601,” but it doesn’t seem a particularly funny contrast. “Elisabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman” is an intelligent production, but it doesn’t have any kick.