Revival of 'We Won't Pay!' is politics as usual

Scott H. Severance and Stephanie Clayman star in Nora Theatre's version of Dario Fo's 1974 protest against inflation in Italy. (Kippy Goldfarb)

CAMBRIDGE - After two weeks of political sloganeering at the Democratic and Republican conventions, it's hard to listen to the agit-prop of "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" without feeling weary. Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo dresses up his power-to-the-people message with some clever clowning, but despite the best efforts of Stephanie Clayman and Scott H. Severance, this Nora Theatre Company production plods along, never building to the required comedic crescendo.

Fo's plot follows an Italian housewife named Antonia (Clayman), who, along with many of the other housewives in her neighborhood, has become fed up with escalating grocery prices. The women riot and decide to shop till they drop without paying a dime. Antonia may have grabbed birdseed and rabbits' heads along with pasta and oil, but it was exhilarating to defy the authorities. She enlists the help of a neighbor to cart home her ill-gotten goods and hide them from her self-righteous husband, Giovanni (Severance), and from the police, who execute a door-to-door search for the stolen food.

To protect herself, Antonia spins a series of outrageous fibs that find her friend instantly pregnant, blind a nutty policeman with the curse of an imaginary saint, and convince her husband that amniotic fluid is made of pickled olive juice.

Written in 1974, when the Italian economy was in the toilet and inflation was rampant, Fo's play struck a chord with citizens torn between powerlessness and rage. And some of his slapstick humor is truly hilarious, which helps make his message - people are hungry for dignity and justice - go down a little easier. But either something has been lost in Ron Jenkins's translation, or director Daniel Gidron couldn't find the right pace to keep the action going through the rhythm-ruining political grandstanding.

In Clayman and Severance, Gidron has found actors comfortable with physical humor right out of "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners." At Saturday night's performance, they were put to the test when the lights unexpectedly went out. The pair went on in total darkness without missing a beat. They even worked the minor mishap into the dialogue, which added to the fun.

Robert Najarian and Elise Audrey Manning provided adequate support as the hapless neighbors drawn into the zany antics, but Antonio Ocampo-Guzman seemed lost in his multiple roles as a police sergeant, state trooper, gravedigger, and grandfather. His reappearances are supposed to be a running joke, but it stopped being funny when the other characters kept pointing it out.

Jenkins's translation, which premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in 1999, works in American political references, but many of the self-referential jokes fall flat. Despite the parallels with current economic woes, Fo's heavy-handed rhetoric feels dated. The production plays like a museum piece rather than a vibrant drama.

"We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" marks the Nora Theatre's debut in the new Central Square Theater after many years of homelessness, but doesn't show off the quality work of which this company is capable.