'We Won't Pay!': A satire of economic woe
Falls Church troupe's second production lacks a seasoned touch

By Celia Wren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 6, 2009

Let's at least give the fledgling Hub Theatre credit for timely programming. To kick off its second season, the Northern Virginia company has mounted "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" by the irreverent Italian playwright Dario Fo, a Nobel laureate. This satirical 1974 comedy is a zany but politically pointed meditation on the inflammatory effects of economic desperation. Boasting dialogue about downsizing and the tyranny of the free market -- not to mention a title that sounds like an American taxpayer's gripe about the Wall Street bailout -- the play certainly feels in tune with the moment.

But creating a convincing anarchic world from Fo's batty scenario is no easy task, and director Patrick Torres and his cast have failed to pull it off. The production's characterizations have a crazy-quilt feel, and stage presence is in short supply. What's more, the abundant slapstick looks labored and rickety -- a problem, because "We Won't Pay!" is basically a farce whose antic spirit twits capitalism rather than bourgeois propriety.

Fo's screwball parable centers on Antonia (Hub artistic director Helen Pafumi) and Giovanni (Michael Kramer), a couple scraping by on the latter's blue-collar salary. After Antonia and other neighborhood women loot food from a supermarket, she and her friend Margherita (Kristen Egermeier) go to extravagant lengths to hide the goods. The resultant nuttiness involves fake pregnancies, a concealed coffin, a welding gun and a package of frozen rabbit heads, but a moment of break-the-fourth-wall political seriousness gets mixed in, too.

In the Hub production, the mayhem plays out in a suitably spartan bedroom and kitchen, complete with a refrigerator plastered with coupons. Occasionally, a tall screen that's a mosaic of supermarket bags stands in for a city streetscape. (Hannah J. Crowell is scenic designer.)

The only performer who looks at home in this environment is Kramer, who plays Giovanni as a robustly dimwitted comic archetype. Not harmonizing too well with this approach are the more naturalistic intonations and gestures of Pafumi's mischievous Antonia. John Slone, who among other turns supplies some Keystone Kops moments as law enforcement officers, appears to be enjoying himself hugely; by contrast, Egermeier looks painfully awkward in all of her scenes.

In a nod to the play's absurdist aesthetic, Torres and choreographer Casey Kaleba have tossed in some stylized physicality -- like the rococo mechanical movements that Giovanni and his friend Luigi (an unobjectionable James Gagne) use to wash dishes. The idea is promising, but this sequence, like most of the production's shtick, looks under-rehearsed. The only really successful element in the show is composer and sound designer Christopher Baine's blend of urban noises and anxious percussion.

Last spring, in its inaugural offering, the Hub mounted a terrific version of Craig Wright's "The Pavilion" -- a poignant piece that's a far cry from the subversive oeuvre of Fo. This unfortunate "We Won't Pay!" may simply be an instance of a young company tackling a knotty artistic challenge before it has developed adequate resources to do so.

"We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" by Dario Fo, translated by Ron Jenkins. Directed by Patrick Torres; lighting design, Paolo Rodriguez; costumes, Diana Khoury. With Brent Biondo. About 2 hours.