"Mistero Buffo", a terrific success, is the play that more than any other 
establishes Fo's fame worldwide, has blatant - and scurrilous - allusion to 
the feminine genitalia.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to John DeMatteo
 
DARIO FO WILL DIRECT ROSSINI OPERA

The Associated Press 
Tuesday, April 9, 2002

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) - Nobel literature laureate Dario Fo will direct 
Rossini's ``A Journey to Rheims'' next season in Helsinki, the Finnish 
National Opera said.
 
Fo, an Italian playwright, actor and director, is expected to begin 
rehearsals in November with the opening night scheduled for Jan. 17, the 
opera's general director, Erkki Korhonen, said Monday.
 
``We're very excited about this. I can't think of a better person to direct 
this opera,'' Korhonen said.
 
The opera will be conducted by Italian Maurizio Barbacini.
 
Rossini's comic opera, composed in 1825, is about Europeans meeting in a 
hotel on their way to the coronation of King Charles X in the northeastern 
French city of Rheims, a traditional coronation site.
 
Korhonen said Fo's social activism and criticism of injustices against the 
downtrodden made him the perfect choice to direct the opera.
 
``The opera is gently critical of a united Europe, and one can draw a 
parallel to modern European Union summits when leaders from different parts 
of Europe meet,'' Korhonen said.
 
Fo won the Nobel Literature Prize in October 1997.
=================================================
DARIO FO BIOGRAPHY from Nobel E-Museum Web Site:

Dario Fo was born on 26 March 1926 in San Giano, a small town on Lago 
Maggiore in the province of Varese. His family consisted of: his father 
Felice, socialist, station master and actor in an amateur theatre company; 
his mother Pina Rota, a woman of great imagination and talent (in the 1970s 
her autobiographical account "Il paese delle rane", telling the history of 
her home town, was published by Einaudi); his brother Fulvio and his sister 
Bianca; and his maternal grandfather, who had a farm in Lomellina, where 
young Dario spent his childhood vacations. 

During Dario's visits, his grandfather would travel around the countryside 
selling his produce from a big, horse-drawn wagon. To attract customers he 
would tell the most amazing stories, and in these stories he would insert 
news and anecdotes about local events. His satirical and timely chronicles 
earned him the nickname Bristìn (pepper seed). It was from his grandfather, 
sitting beside him on the big wagon, that Dario began to learn the rudiments 
of narrative rhythm. 

Dario spent his childhood moving from one town to another, as his father's 
postings were changed at the whim of the railway authorities. But even though 
the geography remained in a flux, the cultural setting was always the same. 
As the boy grew, he became schooled in the local narrative tradition. With 
growing passion, he would sit in the taverns or the piazze and listen 
tirelessly to the master glass-blowers and fishermen, who - in the oral 
tradition of the fabulatore - would swap tall tales, steeped in pungent 
political satire. 

In 1940 he moved to Milan (commuting from Luino) to study at the Brera Art 
Academy. After the war, he begins to study architecture at the Polytechnic, 
but interrupts his studies with only a few exams left to complete his degree. 

Towards the end of the war, Dario is conscripted into the army of the Salo 
republic. He manages to escape, and spends the last months of the war hidden 
in an attic store room. His parents are active in the resistance, his father 
organizing the smuggling of Jewish scientists and escaped British prisoners 
of war into Switzerland by train; his mother caring for wounded partisans. 

At the end of the war, Dario returns to his studies at the Academy of Brera 
in Milan while attending courses in architecture at the Polytechnic, 
commuting each day from his home on Lago Maggiore. 

1945-41 he turns his attention to stage design and theatre décor. He begins 
to improvise monologues. 

He moves with his family to Milan. Mamma Fo, in order to help her husband put 
the three children through college, does her best as a shirt-maker. 

For the younger Fos, this is a period of ravenous reading. Gramsci and Marx 
are devoured along with American novelists and the first translations of 
Brecht, Mayakovsky and Lorca. 

In the immediate postwar years, Italian theatre undergoes a veritable 
revolution, pushed along mainly by the new phenomenon of piccoli teatri 
["small theatres"] that play a key role in developing the idea of a "popular 
stage". 

Fo is captured by this effervescent movement and proves to be an insatiable 
theatregoer - even though he usually can't afford to buy a seat and has to 
stand through the performances. Mamma Fo keeps an open mind and an open 
house for her children's new acquaintances, among them Emilio Tadini, Alik 
Cavalieri, Piccoli, Vittorini, Morlotti, Treccani, Crepax, some of them 
already famous. 

During his architecture studies, while working as decorator and assistant 
architect, Dario begins to entertain his friends with tales as tall as those 
he heard in the lakeside taverns of his childhood. 

In the summer of 1950, Dario seeks out Franco Parenti who is enthralled by 
the young man's comical rendering of the parable of Cain and Abel, a satire 
in which Cain, poer nano ["poor little thing"], a miserable fool, is anything 
but evil. It's just that every time he tries, poer nano,to mimic the 
splendid, blond and blue-eyed Abel, he gets into trouble. After suffering one 
disaster after another, he finally goes crazy and kills the splendid Abel. 
Franco Parenti enthusiastically invites Fo to join his theatre company's 
summer variety show. 

For a while he continues to work as assistant architect. But he soon decides 
to abandon his work and studies, disgusted by the corruption already rampant 
in the building sector.......

An extensive, expansive, incompasing and rich chronology follows....from 
which the following information is excerpted.. 

His wife Franca Rame plays a major part in his projects, and I found Dario's 
courting of Franco extremely amusing. 

In 1951 Dario has his first "encounter" with Franca Rame - not in person, 
mind, but in the form of a photograph he sees at the home of some friends. He 
is thunderstruck! During the 1951-52 theatre season, Franca Rame and Dario Fo 
meet by chance: they are both engaged in a production of "Sette giorni a 
Milano", at the Odeon Theatre in Milan. Dario's courting technique is 
drastic: he pretends not to see Franca. After a couple of weeks of this, she 
grabs him backstage, pushes him up against a wall and gives him a passionate 
kiss. They are engaged!!!! 

Fo's monologues and performances starting in 1951 on RAI "Cocoricò", (the 
Italian national radio's show) earns a certain notoriety with his "poer nano" 
monologues, and his innovative use of language that subverts the rhetoric of 
"official" narrative,and is  permeated with social and political satire and 
farce, that is to become his lifelong hallmark. 

Fo's targets are are a wide spectrum including The Catholic Church, the 
Mafia, Spain's "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs and Jews, Fascism, corruption in 
Italy, (it anticipates by some thirty years the revolution brought about by 
the "Mani Pulite" ["Clean hands"] movement), the Soviet invasion of 
Czechoslovakia, critique of Stalinism, the social-democratic position of the 
Italian Communist Party, the Red brigades, ecology and environmentalism, the  
massacres at Tienanmen Square, the legalization of drugs, the Seminole 
Nation, etc. Fo campaigns on behalf of  the difficulties of common people and 
unions, situation of  women in the 70's, the Palestinian resistance, AIDS, 
informing teenagers of sexuality, etc.

I would have to research it further, but I have some misgivings about:
"Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe", slightly revised on occasion of 
the "celebration" of the quincentenial anniversary of the "discovery" of 
America. 

 http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1997/fo-bio.html