In 1921, an Italian immigrant "flew" out of the window of a New York police station: this is the episode that Dario Fo used as the excuse for Accidental Death of an Anarchist , a tragic, hilarious, and disturbing farce that, more than fifty years later, is still performed with great success throughout the world. The " accidental death ," as Fo ironically defined it, was in reality that of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli , who fell on December 15, 1969, from the fourth floor of the Milan Police Headquarters during one of the interrogations related to the Piazza Fontana massacre . An "active illness," as the investigation described it.

The edition of those years, curated and performed by Fo, quickly became legendary, epochal, with endless sold-out performances for over two hundred evenings, vibrant with enthusiasm and social and civic participation. All this was accompanied by attempts at censorship, provocations, and real dangers, with repeated, cyclical anonymous phone calls warning of bombs in the theater. This is because Pinelli's death was beyond suspicious, so much so that Fo's text , through the comic paradox of its writing, is actually based on authentic documents, trial records, and thoroughly documented journalistic investigations that expose the causes and political roots of the widespread and disturbing "state massacre" that bloodied those years, of which this episode is a tragic emblem.

But Fo's genius , still evident today, is that of setting this event in a ridiculously grotesque context , with the protagonist and driving force of the action being a Fool , a modern jester who happens to suffer from "istriomania" (i.e. the uncontrollable need to pass himself off as other people) and who therefore uses comic play, disguise, masks, satirical mockery as a weapon to unmask the arrogant lies and gross contradictions of a clumsy and brazen power (commissioners, agents and police chiefs) that denies the truth and the evidence of its own degradation.

" In dark times we must sing the dark times ," wrote Brecht. Similarly, Fo courageously chooses the uncomfortable position of the non-aligned rebel , facing, among other things, more than two hundred complaints and trials, to tell on stage a truth that no one really wanted to seek, much less discover. Again with Brecht, Dario prefers " to put himself on the wrong side, because all the other places were taken. "

Our Fool will be Lodo Guenzi , an actor with multifaceted talents who will lead a comic, grotesque and satirical saraband that is part comedy of errors, part slapstick comedy , part grotesque theatre of denunciation, aware of the great legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning author and at the same time a modern performer who makes that tradition his own to renew and reshape it according to his own artistic sensibility and modern critical conscience.