You can bend it, you can fold it, you can squeeze it, you can stretch it, you can bounce it, and still it comes back for more. On stage at Berkeley Rep, Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist looks nothing like what a reader of its printed text would expect �" or could possibly imagine. Apparently whatever firm that licenses rights to present this play don't hold its client's words as sacrosanct. "This isn't Dario Fo," says an actor to another who has strayed into rants on Bush-Cheney, Iraq, WMDs, mortgage scandals, and other misaffairs of state. But Fo would approve, claims the off-script actor, before continuing on about the dangers of penis-shaped wedding cakes in Arizona.
Fo is quite alive, and Accidental Death, first produced in 1970, is years away from the public domain, so we must accept on faith that Fo, or his representatives, are satisfied with liberties taken in this co-production with Yale Rep. The pop-culture references and self-referential gags that polka dot the production can be verbal or visual, and for all this broadness it's still a style that walks a narrow rope. In the vernacular of this production, these are cluster-fuck jokes that can just as easily miss the target as make a strike.
But director Christopher Bayes and comic dynamo Steven Epp have plenty of target practice working together. Two years ago, they brought A Doctor in Spite of Himself to Berkeley Rep in a similar gag-fest whirlwind of anachronisms and winks to the audience. But though a farce, Fo's play comes from a serious place in not-so-distant political history, and some of that context can be lost when the Three Stooges are being emulated, 1970s sitcoms referenced, and Jude Law evoked in this translation by Gillian Hanna and tweaked by Gavin Richards.
Fo's play was inspired by the mysterious 1969 death of avowed anarchist and suspected terrorist Giuseppe Pinelli, who somehow passed through the fourth-floor window of a Milan police station to the street below. In Fo's fictionalized account, unanswered questions about the defenestration have been swept under the rug by the police station's bumbling staff �" at least until a certified maniac (and he has the papers to prove it) starts asking awkward questions in the guise of an investigating judge.
As the wily madman, Epp is fascinating to watch in a performance of bipolar burlesque, reacting in character with the other performers on stage while keeping the audience in on his joke. The other characters are mostly caricatures, getting laughs with exaggerations of looks and behavior, notably Eugene Ma's roly-poly dim-sum constable and Allen Gilmore's variation on a bad 1970s black sitcom character. Liam Craig, Renata Friedman, and Jesse J. Perez are in roles of somewhat lesser cartoon station. Aaron Halva provides musical accents from the side of the stage, which would be rim shots in venues of lesser prestige.
Accidental Death of an Anarchist will run at Berkeley Rep through April 20. Tickets are $29-$99. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to www.berkeleyrep.org.