The 1970 play Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Italian playwright Dario Fo is being performed until March 9 by the Actors Gang, founded in 1981 by a group of actors, with Tim Robbins as artistic director. Since 2005 their theater is located in Culver City’s historical Ivy Substation, built in 1907 in the Mission Revival style to house electrical equipment for the Los Angeles Pacific Railway. It was left vacant in 1953 and restored in 1993.
Tim Robbins, who had directed and acted in the political satire Bob Roberts (1992), now says, “I made that film as a warning about politics becoming superficial entertainment, based on factors that have nothing to do with the truth, image over substance, and the power of the media to create an image for someone, even though their past is very clearly clouded with potential misdeeds. And I believe that is what happened with Mr. Trump, he was elevated into a candidate by this crazy fascination we have with reality TV and celebrity.”
“There is a direct line between Bob Roberts and Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which stands in defiance of fascism. At a time when authoritarian governments are being supported by our president, and the judiciary is being corrupted by politics, this play resonates as if it was written yesterday. What inspired me, when I first read Dario Fo, was his ability to produce incredibly funny situations and dialogue about important social subject matter. Dario’s wicked humor and courageous satire gave me great inspiration to create theater that was relevant, entertaining and dangerous in its uncompromising telling of truth to power.”
We went to see this American version of the play and were impressed by its manic intensity. You may read a review in Cultural Weekly. However, if you understand Italian, we encourage you to watch this 1987 video of Morte accidentale di un anarchico, with the incredible Dario Fo in the title role.
It is preceded by an introduction about the real life events that inspired the play, when police immediately arrested a railway worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, accusing him of the bombing of a bank, which had been more likely carried out by a right wing group with ties to law-enforcement. While the innocent man was being interrogated at police headquarters in Milano, he jumped or was thrown out of a fourth story window to his death. Fo recalls that the authorities were quite upset about the staging of his play, that made a farce out of their criminal blunder, and they brought his theater troupe to court 40 times. So in order to avoid sentencing, the name Pinelli was never mentioned, it was replaced with Andrea Salsedo, an Italian anarchist who in 1920, two days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, fell to his death from the a 20th story window of the Bureau of Investigations offices in New York City.
Dario Fo, who died in 2016 at the age of 90, was a comedian, a playwright and a political activist. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.
Text by Elisa Leonelli