STAGE REVIEW : SDSU Fares Better With Comic Side of Italian Farce

Farces, according to the dictionary, are based on broadly humorous, highly unlikely situations.

Farces, according to Italian playwright Dario Fo, can be based on life. Certainly that is the case in “We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay,” one of Fo’s best-known plays in the United States.

The play begins when a shopper, Antonia, enraged by the rising prices in supermarkets, refuses to pay for the goods she takes.

Fo wrote the story in 1974, drawing on actual incidents in Italy when a combination of soaring prices and widespread worker layoffs led to a rash of people refusing to pay for groceries, transportation, gas and electricity.

Antonia’s conservative working-class husband, Giovanni, has no patience with such a movement. It is his intransigence that sets the stage for a farce in which Antonia embarks on a complicated series of “I Love Lucy”-type stratagems to hide the goods from him. Add Margherita as accomplice and husband Luigi as Giovanni’s dimwitted best friend and you have Ethel and Fred Mertz. Top with the inevitable political awakening on the part of Giovanni, and you have in essence, a farce with teeth.

The production of “We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay,” at San Diego State University’s Don Powell Theatre through April 16, does a better job on the humorous than on the serious side.

Visiting director Peter Larlham does coax some pale intimation of the underlying hunger that motivates the action, but chiefly from Drew Kahn and Zachary Weintraub as Giovanni and Luigi.

As Antonia, Alexandra Argyropoulos seems to have one thing on her mind: bringing home the jokes, which she does with an almost manic, if at times winning, determination. She radiates so much energy that Dorrie Board’s Margherita gives the impression of catching on Argyropoulos’ coattails as if she is going along for the ride.

Steve Gallion is a standout in his multiple roles as police sergeant, lieutenant, undertaker and old man. Though his parts are done with a distinctive difference, they all share the same very funny, dour soul that begins at the twisted curl of his lips and extends to his long fingers, which seem to weave through the very air at an ironic slant.

The walls come down at angles in the nice askew set design by Beeb Salzer, giving an impression of a house at half-collapse or half-staff.

The colorfully clashing costumes by Randi Norman suit the mood. There’s a bit of the Sad Sack quality to the contrasting stripes and polka dots that suggests the tears on the mask of a clown.

A few real tears just below the surface would have helped the dark side of this play hit home.

Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday at San Diego State University’s Don Powell Theatre.

“First Night,” last winter’s hit West Coast premiere at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, did not mark the last night for Massachusetts playwright Jack Neary in San Diego.

So delighted was he with the rave reviews sent him by Olive Blackistone, artistic director of the North Coast Rep, that a long-distance relationship began that has led to the theater’s first world premiere, “Road Company”--by Neary, of course.

Blackistone and Neary will meet--another first--when the playwright comes out in mid-May to monitor the June 3 opening. Vinny Ferrelli and Carmen Beaubeaux, who starred in “First Night,” will star again in this play about a quiet, unmarried schoolteacher who thinks she is renting a room in her house to an actress, only to find an actor moving in instead. The show runs through July 24.