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We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! 3 stars

There are two distinct inspirations at work in Italian playwright Dario Fo's We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!: the economic and the farcical. The economic theme includes salvoes against inflation and downsizing and a government with policies resulting in hunger and homelessness. The farcical impulse, meanwhile, is about false pregnancies, male ignorance, stupid policemen, the taste of dog food and the difficulty of keeping a hidden corpse hidden. The problem with the play is that these driving forces seldom merge, and the least daring of the two — the farce — gets most of the stage time.

For the first act or so, we don't really mind; there are several comic gems here, especially when a character thinks he's discovered that a woman's amniotic sac contains, along with a fetus, olives and pickle juice. But one can only find phony pregnancies funny for so long, and what had us in stitches in Act One begins to drag in Act Two, until we're just a little bored and in no danger at all of being radicalized.

The reintroduction of political speechifying at play's end — when we hear about human dignity and the power of solidarity — is too unearned to be really stirring, and anyway, the cartoonish characters we've just watched over two hours have been anything but dignified. So if this is supposed to be message theater, it's not convincing, and if it's supposed to be all-out farce, it's only a half-success.

Nevertheless, kudos go to Jobsite Theater for bringing Nobel laureate Fo's work to Bay area audiences — Jobsite also presented the more impressive Accidental Death of an Anarchist several years ago — but this is not an important play. It's more Marx Brothers than Marx, and less formidable than either.

The play starts out promisingly enough, with the character Antonia explaining to her friend Margherita how she came by the many groceries in her apartment. It seems that there was an insurrection in a nearby supermarket: shocked at high prices, all the shoppers insisted on paying only what they thought reasonable, and then went on to grab groceries without paying at all.

Now the police are on the trail of the thieves, and what's worse, Antonia's law-abiding husband Giovanni is due home any minute. Margherita stuffs some of the contraband under her dress, leading Giovanni to conclude, with Antonia's help, that she must be pregnant. More confusions occur when Margherita's husband arrives — unaware, of course, that his wife is "pregnant" — and when a comic state trooper (state trooper? in Italy?) bursts into Antonia's apartment demanding that she show him the stolen goods. The lies that Antonia and Margherita tell become more and more convoluted; the clueless husbands become more and more confused; and that pesky state trooper becomes more and more demanding.

By the time the action ends, we've heard about baby transplants (from one woman to another), bogus saints (who demand that women feign pregnancy), birdseed soup with frozen rabbit heads, and the surprisingly palatable "meat compost for cats and dogs."

We've also imbibed a little economic commentary. Just about everyone in the play is having trouble paying for basic necessities, and Antonia's family may be evicted for non-payment of rent. There are several jibes at Pope John Paul II — especially concerning his desire that the faithful procreate — and Margherita's husband, we learn, has been involved in a work stoppage. Even the policeman on the trail of the stolen groceries admits that he can hardly make ends meet on his salary. Clearly society is failing to provide for its citizens.

But the play only addresses these issues for a few minutes. What we mostly get in the two hours of We Won't Pay! is farce that's no more about economics or politics than an episode of The Three Stooges. And director David M. Jenkins has asked his cast to affect a style that at every moment (and aptly) prefers caricature to character.

Katrina Stevenson, who has the central role of Antonia, signals the artificiality of the action by striking poses, amplifying emotions and shouting out lines for maximum unreality. As her best friend Margherita, Meg Heimstead emphasizes daffiness and ultra-naïveté (one can't help but be reminded of Georgette in the old Mary Tyler Moore show), and as husband Giovanni, Ward Smith is a kind of masculine robot, treating women like beings from an entirely different galaxy and generally showing himself incapable of handling complicated data.

Margherita's husband Luigi is played by Michael C. McGreevy as a likable lug with next to nothing between his ears, and Chris Holcom, in multiple roles (policeman and state trooper among them) finds the most extreme interpretations possible and then runs with them unreservedly. It's true that there are times when one gets fed up with all the shouting, but it's also a fact that, for the most part, this excessiveness seems right.

John Lott's set of an efficiency apartment isn't very interesting, though he inhabits it with several crosses, a picture of John Paul II and a statue of the Virgin Mary, but Stevenson's costumes, from her own red dress with white polka dots to Margherita's trench coat and Smith's T-shirt, are nicely emblematic. The translation of the play, by the way, is by Ron Jenkins; I assume that the Jobsite team added certain timely remarks about high gasoline prices.

Finally, I have to admit that it was only when We Won't Pay! was explicitly political/economic that I found it very interesting. Statements about high costs, layoffs and government-as-robbery may not be new, but they're a lot more provocative than the corpse in the closet or the groceries disguised as pregnancy.

Since political theater is mostly missing from the American scene, one can't help but be stimulated by the few moments when Fo suggests that, for example, poverty need not be thought of as inevitable. Sure, we're conscious that there are people who can't eat on their minimum-wage salaries, but most American playwrights seem uninterested in the fact. It's a relief to hear such an issue addressed, for a change. I only wish Fo had spent more of We Won't Pay! doing so.

Then his play might have been not just entertaining — but essential.

This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2006.