With the price of groceries rising every day, what’s a poor girl to do? Spontaneously protest by stuffing food up her sweater and pretending to be pregnant, of course!

In a new translation, We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! is a side-splitting, chaotic comedy of errors. Think classic commedia dell’arte meets The Honeymooners. At the heart of all the high jinks is a basic human need – hunger – and the very human desire to satisfy that need with one’s dignity intact.

Fans of Jobsite’s previously produced politically-charged work like The Complete History of America (abridged), The Mineola Twins and Cloud Nine should feel completely at home with this new production.

In We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! simple housewife Antonia is forced into joining a crowd of women in “liberating” groceries due to poverty and merciless price-gouging in a world where both government and business conspire against the working class.

When the police begin a house-to-house search, Antonia enlists the aid of her best friend Margherita to hide the goods by masquerading as pregnant women. As the first lie is told to Antonia’s factory worker husband Giovanni, a wild comic sequence of events explodes and spirals out of control through the final curtain.

We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! has been staged in over thirty countries. Like Chaplin’s tramp reduced to eating his shoe in The Gold Rush, Dario Fo’s clowns suffer from hungers with which everyone can identify.

Dario Fo’s strength is in the creation of texts that simultaneously amuse, engage and provide perspectives. As in commedia dell’arte, Fo’s plays are open for creative additions and dislocations, encouraging improvisation and influencing the audience in remarkable ways.