Mistero Buffo is Dario Fo's "tour de force," wherein he created his own subversive version of the Passion stories, combining storytelling, monologues, dialogues and even crowd scenes, in which he would play all the parts. This ever-evolving series of "creation stories" is infused with the rhythmic drive of a jazz improvisation, the immediacy of a newspaper headline and the epic scope of a historical novel. Like all his work, Mistero Buffo elicits a multiplicity of overlapping dialogues: between the actor and the audience; between the text and the body of the actor; between conventional visions of the Bible and provocative reinterpretations of the Gospels; and between standard uses of language and the invented dialect with which the stories are told.

In 1977, a television version was denounced in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore, as "the most blasphemous program ever broadcast in the history of world television," which led to Fo's banning from the airwaves for the next seven years. Since, Fo and his wife and collaborator, Franca Rame have performed Mistero Buffo throughout the world, sometimes to over 30,000 spectators at a time. It is estimated that the play has been performed to over 10,000,000 people.

One of the major theatrical artists of the 20th century, Italy's Dario Fo, together with Franca Rame, his wife and creative partner, have been creating a theatrical foray uniquely their own for more than 50 years. One of the world's most produced playwrights, Fo was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ron Jenkins holds a doctorate from Harvard and a Masters in buffoonery from the Ringling Brothers Clown College. His translations of Dario Fo and Joshua Sobol have been performed at theatres around the country. He is the author of Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter and is the chair and artistic director of the -theatre department at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.