Director's Notes From the 1997 Citation of the Swedish Academy awarding Dario Fo the Nobel Prize for Literature: Dario Fo …emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden…For many years Fo has been performed all over the world, perhaps more than any other contemporary dramatist, and his influence has been considerable…With a blend of laughter and gravity he opens our eyes to abuses and injustices in society and also the wider historical perspectives in which they can be placed. One of my deeply held beliefs is: It’s only funny if it’s true. I think it applies to all the great comedies. It applies to life, too. It’s pretty hard to laugh when you find out that someone has been lying to you. Dario Fo would want you to know that this very funny play is about a true story. In 1969, a political dissident named Giovanni Pinelli was being held in a Milan police station for questioning as a suspect in a terrorist bombing. He “fell” to his death from the fourth floor window, an event ruled “accidental” in the official inquiry. At the time of this play’s first production, a libel trial was running in which a police commissioner was suing a newspaper for insinuating that he was responsible for the anarchist’s death. (After all, he was found to be “responsible but not culpable.”) Sound familiar? Well in this play, written in 1972, you’ll hear about terrorist bombings, government cover-ups, the atrocities of war in Iraq, civil strife, police brutality, and the curtailing of civil liberties. You’ll hear the absurd lengths that police go to in order to justify their actions. And you’ll see a representative of the Liberal Press agree to collaborate in order to advance her own agenda. In our country, at the time, the President was beginning to explain his involvement in the Watergate break-ins. Americans still believed that their government respected civil liberties, and acted compassionately towards dissenters in custody. We believed that radical subversives might destroy our way of life. We believed that the Press was the honorable “Fourth Estate,” objectively reporting the Truth. Sound familiar? Sound funny? I didn’t think so either. But then I read what Dario Fo had to say about his portrait of this very serious world, and what happens when you add a Fool that can impersonate anyone from a judge to a psychiatrist, who sings and howls like a dog, who terrorizes the police station with a glass eye and not one but two prosthetic limbs. He told his translator, Ron Jenkins, “I realized that a criminal act had been conducted by the state, but people were calmly accepting the results of the official investigation. When I injected absurdity into the situation, the lies became apparent.” And his audience? “They split their sides laughing…but as the performance went on…the grins froze on their faces and in most cases turned into a kind of …scream.” So the violent, criminal world we live in is absurd and funny. And Dario Fo taught me another lesson: It’s only true if it’s funny. —-Dave Mowers, director, 2004