Conclusion

Abstract

In Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, Susan Bennett provides an example of the American predilection to down- play or erase politics from the stage. She cites R. G. Davis’s “Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo,” which found that US troupes accentuated comedy and minimized subversion in Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, thereby making a failure of what had been a success in London’s West End. “In North America, the depoliticizing at the production stage destroyed the play,” Bennett writes (98–99).