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Albert Innaurato's Plays: Bizarre Behavior in Bizarre America Blossom S. Kirschenbaum Brown University--Box E Providence, Rhode Island 02912 Albert
Innaurato's Plays: Bizarre Behavior in Bizarre America The
word "bizarre," meaning "odd in manner or appearance,
grotesque, queer, eccentric," assumes agreement about standards of
normalcy. We like to think we share a
sense of normal. We can agree that for
all our quirks, we are normal. On occasion we let loose, show our wild or
wacky ways, go overboard. Mostly,
though, we do what we're supposed to do, behaving unremarkably. Yet
one autumn morning on national television Donovan was interviewing
trans-sexual spouses; and normal television viewers tuned in nationwide
probably felt that they were having a normal day, for normal days vary, and
even the most normal may include an aberration or two.[1]It's not the
commonest marital complication, this, but it's not wholly different from
other changes that precipitate crisis, for all crises imply both inner and
interpersonal stress. Daily,
in fact, we are titillated or affronted by public irregularities and
abnormalities, by sexual and financial scandal involving televangelists and
priests, movie stars and athletes, politicians, bankers and businesspeople;
maybe even a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Police charged with enforcing laws may
break them instead. In New Bedford,
Massachusetts, for instance, husband-and-wife police officers were lately
convicted and sentenced for raping one child, assaulting and battering
another.[2] Where drugs are involved, no neighborhood is safe. We remember what a New York lawyer and his
children's-book-editor companion did to an illegally adopted little girl, now
dead, and a baby boy.[3] We might say
well, that was Greenwich Village; but consider, bodies of Alice and Ernest
Brendel and their young daughter were dug up from shallow graves half a mile
from their home in Barrington, an affluent suburb of Providence, Rhode
Island. The couple were Brown
University alumni; Alice worked in the main library on campus. The sole suspect was a former commodities
broker, a Sunday school teacher in his church, whose own lawyer, trying to
build an insanity defense, found his client's testimony incredible. A jury found the accused Mr.
Hightower guilty of all three
murders.[4] Nor are children
innocent; we read of adolescent murderers---for instance California's Erik
and Lynn Menendez, who killed their parents: "Menendez case draws a full
house," said the Los Angeles
Times.[5] To
keep our balance, we harden ourselves against reports of drive-by shootings,
serial killers, shotgun stalkers, elusive snipers, muggings, vanishings, all
part of daily life---and death. Since
indifference is no answer, we need imaginative help in coping. Decades ago novelist Philip Roth published
an essay about how fact outstrips fiction.[6] While Ralph Ellison was writing
a novel about assassination of a senator, the real-life president of our
nation was actually assassinated, and then his attorney-general brother
murdered too. We may well wonder what
is a normal life, a normal day. Preparing
for the abnormal as we go about our normal lives may motivate our seeking
out, in the make-believe realm of the arts, spectacles that offend. The 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, for instance, shows "the rape of an
extremely pretty nun. The director is
not shy about either the details of the assault or the nun's extreme piety in
its aftermath. He may mean to switch
gears when he moves from a sordid rape scene to the nun's forgiveness of
'those boys, those sad, raging boys,' but in fact the note of excess is much
the same"--as critic Janet Maslin says.[7] When popular culture is replete with lurid episodes, and
newspapers serve them up daily (detailing recovery of the bodies of real-life
raped and murdered nuns), dramatists cannot refuse to bring excess onto the
stage and play out its various meanings.
Themes introduced live to small audiences soon occur also on movie
screens coast-to-coast. In Bad Lieutenant, for instance, the
Jesus Christ who appears to the hallucinating protagonist "displays a
hip-tilting posture and has swagger to spare"--a sacrilegious image to
those who consider homosexuality sinful, but in another view the encounter of
two tortured souls. The drug addict
in this film who says "We gotta eat away at ourselves until there's
nothing left except appetite" is also describing Innaurato's Benno
Blimpie. What draws us to such
spectacles, besides the thrill-seeking of boredom, may be normalcy reaching
out to a more inclusive compassion and--dare we declare
it?---self-knowledge. Drama,
like fiction, is challenged to keep pace with and even forecast reality. Performance lets us as audience confront,
collectively and supportively, what might otherwise seem too
threatening. Writers and audience
need each other for this very purpose.
Playwrights Horizons, for example, the critically acclaimed
off-Broadway group, has abetted reexamination of social norms by its
willingness to explore on stage what used to pass for deviation, and it is
going strong. It is first and
foremost a writers' theater, and one of its stars, who developed with and
through that theater, is Albert Innaurato.[8] Born
in 1948 into a working-class Italian Catholic family in South Philadelphia, a
sensitive and precocious childwho was composing opera libretti at age eight,
Albert Innaurato found his vocation early.
His play Urlicht was
conceived in his late teens and a printed version appeared before age
twenty-one.[9] Innaurato went on to graduate from the Yale School of
Drama. There he and classmate
Christopher Durang collaborated on the 1972 I Don't Generally Like Poetry, But Have You Read "Trees"? and on the 1974 musical The Idiots Karamazov, in which Meryl
Streep played the central role. He
called his early Wisdom Amok
"frankly crazy," and made his real debut at a time when "the
writer no longer necessarily felt compelled to seek the endorsement of
Broadway."[10] That is, the writer may well want the big-time rewards of
money and fame but be unwilling to pander.
How frankly crazy a writer can keep on being depends on courage, wit,
endurance, even desperation, as well as on opportunity, support,---and luck. In some circumstances, though, outright
craziness becomes the sanest and most practical alternative for surviving
real horror. Innaurato's
first major play, The Transfiguration
of Benno Blimpie, based on a nightmare in which he recalled the brutality
of parochial school, is a tragicomic vision of an ethnic boy eating himself
to death. Written while he was still
studying at Yale, it was finished later that summer of 1972 in Edward Albee's
house for writers, and it extends the critical perspective on American
obsessions and intolerances of Albee's own Sandbox, Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf, and other plays.
After several small-group stagings in the 1970's Benno Blimpie proved Playwrights' greatest success of
1982-83. It ran for three months; though
the theater had a rather modest 74 seats, for three months those seats
continued to fill. Then
Innaurato created a workshop production at Playwrights Horizon that moved on
to Circle Repertory Theater and later became a Broadway hit. This was Gemini. Here an Italian working-class youth facing his 21st
birthday receives an unannounced visit from two WASP friends met at
Harvard. Begun with support from a
Guggenheim grant, Gemini was
developed while Innaurato worked at a series of temporary jobs, "mostly
humiliating," he says.[11] He polished the play with support from a
Rockefeller grant. What he lived through while writing---worsening of a
medical condition, hemorrhaging, uninsured hospitalization, surgery,
infection and high fever---did not spoil his pleasure in the writing itself,
which probably helped sustain him. He
found actors who were excited enough about the play to want to do it whether
or not they could live off their stage earnings. Sigourney Weaver, whom
Innaurato had known at Yale, agreed to take the part of Judith. A committed cast "willed their love
of the piece and the associations to that love into three dimensions,"
as Innaurato puts it.[12] Reviews
were good. The show moved to another
theater on Long Island. Changes were made.
Gemini opened at the Long Island theater PAF in a terrible
snowstorm, to an audience of about thirty.
But what an ovation they gave!
The run was extended. Backers
picked up the play in New York because someone else's deal had fallen
through, and it opened the very day after Adela Holtzer's production of Benno Blimpie. That synchronicity was
a lucky break. The long run that
followed, 1788 continuous performances, was, Innaurato admits,
"facilitated by a vulgar television commercial" which
misrepresented the play but contributed to its success---a success that may
be measured by comparisons to other long runs: La Cage aux Folles,
1761 performances, and Harvey, with
1775, were runners-up. The play ran
on Broadway for more than four years.[13] Such
success did not protect Innaurato, at age thirty, from scathingly harsh
homophobic attack for his next play.
Nor did it assure him of audience or livelihood. Whereas Gemini had been found insufficiently "gay" by Bob Moss of
Playwrights Horizons, Ross Wetzsteon of Village
Voice found it so very gay that he coined the term "gayist" for
it, though other critics found it "heterosexist." Several years
later, the writer-director of the 1980 film version, Happy Birthday, Gemini, probably "softened" the edges of the play, as one review said, and
further blurred the labeling. But Ulysses in Traction, about a campus
revolution that traps a group of theater students in a rehearsal hall during
a race riot, drew the wrath of New York
Times reviewer Richard Eder, who, while misunderstanding the play, made
Innaurato the target of vicious "fag-bashing." Innaurato has written about this attack
lucidly, though pain and outrage break through.[14] After the clownish Passione, which some critics (infuriating the author) labeled a
redundant version of Gemini, the
next major play was in part a retaliation.
Then Coming of Age in Soho
went through a lot of reworking. An
early version remained much too long, even after a workshop production in
Seattle and previews in New York.
Joseph Papp rescued him, says Innaurato, steering the play's focus
from the more conventional theme of a woman divided among her art, her
lovers, and her child, to a virtually new work, more autobiographical, about
a man's attempt to define his sexuality.
What happens in the play is decent enough. As the author says of his main characters, "They love each
other as equals, and in denying himself, [the protagonist] finds for the
first time in his life the pleasure or pain of love untethered to questions
of gender, role playing, or futurity."[15] Reviewers applauded the
humor, but Innaurato considered their views negative. Again
he reacted. Gus and Al portrays the
playwright himself "despondent over the reviews of his latest
work." This play carries forward investigations of both ethnic and
sexual aspects of identity. Produced
in Denver in 1987, it ran for 25 performances with Playwrights Horizons and
ranks among the best plays of 1988-89.
Critics found fault with the ending, but praised the characterizations
and treated Gus and Al as
Innaurato's main work since Gemini. Innaurato has gained further recognition
in biographical essays, interviews, and serious critical discussion. He maintains that his plays are not any
more "autobiographical" than the critics' reviews, for we all write
out of who we are. This reciprocal
insistence on authentic self and common humanness is his characters'
challenge to each other and their challenge to us. In all his plays, even as he
appeals to radically differing audiences, Innaurato reinterprets lives of
working-class Italian Americans from poor, predominantly Italian urban
neighborhoods, showing zaniness and distress in "ethnic" terms but
so compassionately as to enhance our collective understanding of what we suffer
and what we inflict. These plays
bypass the question of what is normal. They invite audiences beyond
embarrassment, to contemplate what is truly valued in daily life, what is
truly needed, how we contort ourselves in both true and misguided pursuit of
happiness, and how we may learn to love each other better. .Innaurato breaks
through categorization. The Best Plays of Albert Innaurato was
published by Gay Presses of New York, but Gemini
is also included in at least one mass-market paperback anthology, and Gus and Al appears abridged in the Burns Mantle Yearbook 1988-89. It would be more to the point to inquire into Innaurato's quite
original uses of"ethnic background." Familiar elements---church, food, non-standard English, opera and
painting, gangsters---are seen anew.
Innaurato works the territory between who we are and how we like to
see ourselves. Fusing naturalism and
surrealism, he finds new approaches to predicaments and hostilities we all
face. On stage and in print, the plays
deserve closer attention. The
early Wisdom Amok offers a generous
sample of Innaurato's anticlericalism.
The characters are Father Augustine Wisdom, a man in his 30's; the
Mother Superior; Nuncle, a beautiful young woman; and Mad Nuns, Nurses, and
Attendants, whose roles may be taken by men or women, says the
playwright. A Narrator may call out
locations of scenes. In the first of
these Father Wisdom, at a wake, grieves openly for the lost masculine beauty
of a certain Chris, and dedicates three unpublished volumes of poems to him
as well as other unpublished writings.
An official tells him he's at the wrong coffin. He and the mother of the dead young woman
in the coffin argue. They also
mistake each other's identity and hurl invective. The Official is sickened.
Scene 2 implores sympathy for the Mad Nuns. In Scene 3, hospitalized Father Wisdom is visited by the Abbot,
whose monologue of reproach notes the archbishop's disapproval of the
writings left behind. Father Wisdom
is offered a chance to redeem himself with a speech about Holy Mother's
position on the abortion controversy---a last chance, failing which Wisdom is
assigned, or consigned, to missionary work in the madhouse for nuns. In Scene 4, a procession with tambourines,
holy emblems, and parasols files by; the nuns are bearing a trussed
motorcyclist. ... Small wonder that
Innaurato attracts invective as well as debate. His
stance is neither irresponsible or untimely.
No longer ago than November 14, 1991, Mary Ann Sorrentino, former
executive director of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island, excommunicated on
television for her work with this agency and forbidden a Church funeral,
asked the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island whether canon law had changed
to allow Joyce C. Quinn, deceased head of the Women's Medical Center and
therefore her counterpart, a Roman Catholic burial. Mrs. Quinn did get a Catholic Mass and burial, the Reverend
Edward J. McGovern conveying God's forgiveness; and in the standing-room
crowd at the funeral those who had often picketed her clinic did not assault
those who had been Mrs. Quinn's supporters.[16] The situation offered other
possibilities, though, for what if the factions had come to blows? Innaurato's play is not more grotesque
than the kinds of errors and insults to which it responds. His
strategy is much like Hamlet's in the corrupt court of Denmark. Helpless to prevent wrong, deprived of his
due, in a quandary how to respond without looking reprehensible, his own life
at stake, Hamlet puts on as entertainment a play reenacting his bitter
unshared knowledge. Innaurato does
likewise, hoping against hope. Our own response depends on how thoroughly we
are taken in by the likes of Claudius the usurper. The
title character in The Transfiguration
of Benno Blimpie (1977) steals money from his mother's purse to go to the
museum and see the Renaissance paintings he loves. He teaches himself to paint, trying to believe that only talent
and sensitivity really count. Yet,
gross and huge, called"pig" and "fat creep" by his own
mother, he knows that looks and sex count too, and he despairs of winning
love and approval. Intense and
obsessed, Benno is also objective and ironic. Imprisoned in his own accreted mass, his freedom limited to
consuming, he persistently consumes.
His disappointed mother supports, besides this inflated son, a gambler
husband and the grandfather she calls a "disgraziato freak." As Carol Bonomo Ahearn points out, the
brutalized characters in this play "lash out at themselves and each
other. They have been beaten by life,
and all---saveBenno--seek to destroy each other."[17] Benno suffers,
but he suffers as the others too suffer, acutely and alone, from excesses and
lacks that are all too common. In
America his ancestral culture, unreinforced, disdained, has dwindled to a few
curse-words. The grandfather cries
"Aiuto, aiuto." But no one helps.
... Benno eats himself to
death. The play presents the double
agony of surfeit and hunger, at a time when corrugated-cardboard housing
enclaves grow in the shadows of our skyscrapers and elevated highways, and
while both involuntary hunger and eating disorders make headlines.When life
brings more pain than pleasure, and purpose is lost, and lack of
accomplishment produces self-loathing, resignation is not an unreasonable
solution. If the play cannot ease
suffering, it can at least ease the isolation of that suffering. Set
in an Italian ghetto of South Philadelphia, Gemini (1977) challenges Hollywood and Disneyworld images. Here we see trash cans, laundry lines,
telephone and utility poles; and in the yard of adjoining brick row-houses,
characters are revealed in intimate vulgarity and vitality. Judith, visiting,
speaks "Harvard Italian" that Fran can't understand---for, as he
explains, "You see, my people over there was the niggers. ... We're
Abbruzzese; so we speak a kinda nigger Italian." His lover Lucille explains "He means
it's a dialect." Yet Fran is
secure in his identity; when Judith asks "You're sure you want us to
stay? ... We'reWasps," he replies "So? I'm broad-minded." He decribes his ex-wife as "one of
them people that like to fade inna the air.
Don' wanna stand out. Francis
[his son] and me, well,we stand out.
Don't wanna, understand, but we talk too loud, cough, scratch
ourselves, get rashes, are kinda big.You have to notice us." Unlike Lucille, who tries to be genteel
and acceptable, Fran has no wish to "fade."[18] And Innaurato's
demand for notice is only natural. As
he told interviewer Elizabeth Stone, in high school he "became an
honorary WASP" and he adjusted, in WASP society, to "leaving the
table hungry"; but he had to accost an establishment that was not
accepting his plays. Then too he
balked at repudiating his family, who were, as he says, "the first ones
to really support me as an artist."[19]
He didn't want to be deformed by defensiveness, and he did want
inclusion. In this play the inward-turning self-destructiveness of obese
Benno bursts out into affirmation, somewhat vulgar but rich in possibilities. In
Coming of Age in Soho (1985), 36-year-old
Bartholemew Dante, called Beatrice, a floundering and divorced author, has
just invited into his quarters younger, blond Arnold. Eager to please, good-hearted about
"perversion," the youth has tied himself to a chair, enacting
bondage. Dante's ex-wife, whom he
calls "the first Mafia Don with a cervix," arrives with an
apprentice Mafioso in tow, bringing comforts of armchair, musical tapes, and
provisions, and trying to reclaim her spouse--but in vain. Despite her
insinuations, there has been no overt sexual activity, though the air is
erotically charged. Then Dy, only 15
but "old enough to suffer, to kill, to die," as he says, fugitive
from school, robbed in the rooming-house where he has been staying,
terrorized by police who have clapped him away among the elderly and the mad,
invited to get high with his social worker, asks refuge. Dante wants to know "And what's so
bad about your family?" They
don't abuse him; much worse.
"They bore me," says Dy.
A third youth arrives. Puer
(named in Latin for Tarzan's son Boy) is Dante's son by a German
terrorist. His mother, he says, is in
prison for having abducted the cast, crew, conductor, and director of a new Gotterdammerung. To Dy, Puer says "So. You are having sexual congress with my
father." Hisdetached
intellectuality mocks every kind of prejudice. In Act Two, Dy's inability to find a job---"And they
wouldn't believe me when I lied about experience"---mirrors a common
frustration not limited to youth.
Dante too has difficulty maturing.
He and Patricia cry out their differences. He objects to the Mafia.
"Oh, fuck organized crime!" she shouts, "it's no
different from the IRS." She
wants to resume their marriage because she is running for public office, but
Dante is tempted by Dy's availability. Meanwhile Puer tries to find a place
as both son and friend. In Act Three the males have bonded into a household,
which Mafioso Danny tries to break up: he must try, for if he didn't,
"What would my mother and brothers say?" Jealousy and other passions are played out. When Patricia's henchman binds and gags
the youths and offers Dante an ultimatum, Puer and Dy sing "We shall
overcome." Patricia's dilemma is
clear: she's moved by the youths'
belief in Dante, though she knows he's a sprite and "sprites don't grow
up, they just wither." Since she
cannot come to terms with love outside the conventional framework, she
departs disappointed. Dante dissuades
Dy from what might earlier have promised sexual fulfillment, because
"now there's too much involved."
Dy and the brother who has found him accept to be their age, their
selves; they return to parents who, however stuffy, love them. The play ends as Dante and his acknowledged
son, using Dy's notebook for inspiration, are writing together. Turns on losing
and finding reveal new structures out of what is sometimes called
"disintegration of the family." Mafia values emerge as all too
dominant, with Puer just arrived from Germany candidly noting to Danny the
hoodlum: "This Mafia confuses me.
You romanticize yourselves as criminals, yet what I see around me here
is a more virulent strain of the middle class." This is the view to be derived also from Goodfellas and other recent serious
gangster films and to be taken, one may hope, less as justification for crime
than as indictment of ruthless domination, the human person reduced to meat
in a dog-eat-dog world. However
contrived the plot, however burlesque the tone, Coming of Age in Soho offers serious culture-criticism. Finally
Gus and Al (1989), instead of
simply bringing a guest from Europe, transports Innaurato's stand-in persona
there. Set in Manhattan 1989 and
Vienna 1901, the play opens with an exchange between a talking gorilla named
Kafka and a paraplegic landlady. Al's
rent is in arrears, reviewers have panned his new play, and now Mrs. Briggs
tells him"There's nothing wrong with failing, it's persevering after
failing which is dumb!" Then a
time machine yanks Al back to Gustav Mahler's house on the Ringstrasse, where
the director of the Vienna Royal Opera and his admirer have just been served
chocolate and pastries by his sister when Al floats in through the
window. He is taken for a madman and
urged to be discreet. Discovering
that he is circumcised, the Mahlers fear arrest for harboring him. "Well, at least he doesn't look
Jewish," comments Natalie. Al
and Gus compete by citing hostile reviews, and cavort gleefully until the
women lead them off. The next scene
presents Camillo, tutor to Sigmund Freud's children, Freud himself, and Alma
Schindler, who later marries Mahler. Opportunities abound for comparing
religious and sexual stances. Gustave
Mahler's 40th birthday is celebrated in the villa's garden. The next scene takes place in Freud's
garden, where Camillo explains "I am a man now and don't want to be kept
and fondled like a girl," to which Al replies with matching candor
"I was really looking for sex but liked to pretend I was looking for
love." Conversation reveals that
Camillo will become Al's grandfather!
When Al is moved to tears by his beautiful young grandfather, Camillo
reproves him, "Grab life, sir, love it, hug it to you ... This weeping
is not suitable for an Italian or even an American of Italian
descent!" The absent ones
return, radiant after lovemaking.
Freud is interested in all the "cases," and at sunset in the
forest all affirm their common humanity and persistence in the creative
struggle. Then lightning
flashes: Kafka and Mrs. Briggs crash
down to reclaim Al. Before departing
he assures Alma "We'll meet again, when I'm a fat boy of fourteen and
you're a very old lady, much married, world famous for your husbands. It'll be in the lobby of the old Met
during an intermission of Otello in
1961 ... " This play offers
reconciliation: not the disdained
immigrant heritage surrendered in favor of a degraded American materialism,
but Old World culture revitalized by American talent and reclamation. It is Innaurato's most frolicsome and
affirmative statement so far. And
in his forties the playwright is going strong. New York Magazine
commended him for his role in the Mozart Bicentennial at Lincoln Center
during summer 1992. Saved for last
were early operas and dramatic cantatas, all but two written when Mozart was
between ages eleven and nineteen, as reviewer Peter G. Davis notes. After discussing sponsorship
("wealthy emperors and archbishops are no longer around to pay the
bills"), the works themselves, six conductors, several orchestras, fifty
singers, Davis says of the five dramatic cantatas, "The whole package was
cleverly knit together by Albert Innaurato, whose sly English dialogue and
direction provided the rival prima donnas[,]with some deliciously wicked
moments."[20] In
their essay on "ethnic theater,"[21] Henry Salerno and Ronald
Ambrosetto say that dispossessed immigrants, eager to cash in on American
opportunities, were too willing to give up their heritage. Now, the "unmeltable ethnics"
(the term is Michael Novak's) revive and reinvent new forms of older
traditions. The cultural revolution
of the 1960's legitimated a return to roots, and ethnicity in America now
earns serious scholarly recognition. Playwrights Horizons is only one
showcase for the new talent. Another,
The Forum, an organization of Italian American playwrights established in
1976, has resurrected Italian American theater from its eclipse during and
after World War II. More than forty
plays were staged by this group, supplemented by dramatic readings, starting
with works by Leonard Melfi, Louis LaRusso, Mario Fratti, and others. There
is little chance for these authors on Broadway, in the opinion of Giuseppe
Carlo DiScipio.[22] Innaurato's Gemini is the exception, in his view,
for the Italian American community does not give strong support or financial
backing. Perhaps unaffordable Broadway
is not where to look. Arthur Miller,
opening his play A Ride Down Mt. Morgan
in London, commented "I don't think there is anything on over there [on
Broadway] which originated there, except for the Neil Simon play. ... the price of tickets is out of sight
as far as a lot of people are concerned.
School teachers, young intellectuals and so on are simply outpriced;
in fact, I would say that two thirds of the conceivable audiences cannot
afford to go." He mentions also
the determining powers of a single newspaper; when tickets cost so much,
people want a guaranteed hit for their money.[23] In less pricey settings writers can be bolder and audiences
more willing to take a chance.
"Ethnicity" could again revitalize a serious, affordable,
alternative entertainment. Off-Broadway
groups like Playwrights Horizon and Forum take the lead, then, followed by
other groups elsewhere, to foster talent and allow for reliving and
discussing Italian American life. But
they also seek a wider audience. Innaurato exemplifies how artists may use
ethnic subjectmatter in general, and Italian American subject-matter in
particular, to illuminate and interpret apparent and real distortions of
American life today. Especially, he
shows how thestage may help us confront what we increasingly either avoid or
inure ourselves to: what is killing us, and how we are dying. By way of taking a better look at
the bizarre in everyday life and the normalcy inherent in what seems
outlandish or threatening, we can support local community theater
groups. We can share not just
reexamination of an immigrant heritage, but the American context in which
that sharing occurs; and we can respond to alternatives. In another country, a playwright became
president. As cynicism pervades
American politics, truth finds refuge in theater. So far, Albert Innaurato is
more convincing than was George Bush in pleading for a kinder, gentler
nation. NOTES [1] On Tuesday, November 12, 1991, 9 a.m., the Donahue program was carried in
Providence, Rhode Island by Channel
10. [2] "Husband-wife police officers jailed
in sex assaults," Providence Journal-Bulletin, Thursday, November 14, 1991. [3] Those events and the ensuing trial of the lawyer are detailed in Joyce Johnson's What
Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies
of the Steinberg Case, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1990. [4] The
New York Times, 1 April 1993, 37:1; 2 April 1993, 23:1; 3 April 1993,
15:2; 21 April 1993, 29:5. [5] 21 July 1993, B1:2. [6] "Writing American Fiction," originally a speech delivered at Stanford University, which cosponsored with Esquire magazine a
symposium on "Writing in America Today"; printed in Commentary, March 1961;
reprinted in Philip Roth,
Reading Myself and Others (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1973; Bantam paperback, 1977, pages 107-124). [7] "Jaded Cop, Raped Nun: Bad Indeed," The New York Times, November 20, 1992. [8] See John
Lombardi, "Playwrights on the
Horizon," New York Times
Magazine, July 17, 1983, pages
22-31. This article's listing in the
Contents is followed by the comment
"A keen business sense and a
sharp sense of comedy have made Playwrights
Horizons an Off Off Broadway success." [9] "Introduction" to Six
Plays by Albert
Innaurato: Bizarre Behavior, New York: Avon/Bard, 1980, vii. [10] Biographical data are drawn from
"Innaurato, Albert," entry in
the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook, pages 263-265;
"Albert Innaurato, 1948?-
" in Contemporary Literary
Criticism, Vol. 60, pages 198-208; and the entry for
Albert Innaurato in the National
Playwrights Directory, page
149. Quoted phrases are from the
"Introduction" to Six Plays by Albert Innaurato: Bizarre Behavior ,, New York: Avon/Bard, 1980. [11] "Introduction" to Best Plays of Albert Innaurato,
New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1987, iv. [12] "Introduction by
Albert Innaurato," Best
Plays of Albert Innaurato, vi. [13] See Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. and Jeffrey
Sweet, The Burns Mantle Theater
Yearbook; The Best Plays of 1988-1989,
New York: Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1989; abridged version of Gus and Al, pages 307-326. [14] Information in the foregoing paragraph
is drawn from Innaurato's
Introduction to Best Plays, xii. [15] "Introduction by Albert
Innaurato," page xvi. [16] "Crowd attends rites for clinic director,"
Providence Journal-Bulletin, Saturday, November 16, 1991, A-9:2-3. [17] Carol Bonomo Ahearn, "Innaurato
and Pintauro: Two Italian-American Playwrights," MELUS, 16:3 (Fall 1989), 113-125
(120). [18] This point
is enlarged upon in Carol Bonomo Ahearn's previously cited
essay; see especially pages 114-117.
Fran remains "inner-directed" while she
is "other-directed," and
his rejection of alien norms
forecasts recognition of ethnotherapy, which
helps members of minority
groups remain respectfully and self-respectfully free to be true to themselves. In the
play, as Ahearn's essay explicates,
Francis must integrate his
opposing cultures; abetted by
his father's example and his father's acceptance, he gets past his birthday-party fiasco
and, by the time he goes off with his friends, he is twin in spirit to
his father; as Ahearn puts
it, "they are twins in having in common a cultural heritage, a
familial bond, and their love for
each other" (119). [19] "It's
Still Hard to Grow Up Italian," The
New York Times Magazine, December 17, 1978, 90, 93. [20] Peter
G. Davis, "From Minor
to Major" (concert
reviews), New York Magazine, September 7, 1992, XXV,
35:54-55 (55). See also James
Oestreich, "Festival of Mozart Operas in Concert," The
New York Times, August 25, 1992, CXLI, C14. [21] "Ethnic Theatre: Introduction," Journal of Popular Culture, XIX:3
(Winter 1985), 91-93. [22] “Italian-American Playwrights on the Rise,”
Journal of Popular Culture, XIX:3
(Winter 1985), 103-108. [23] "A Ride Down Mt. Miller" (Alan
Franks interviews Arthur Miller), The
(London) Times Saturday Review, November 2, 1991, pages 5-6 (55). BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary sources: Innaurato,
Albert. Best Plays of Albert Innaurato; with
an introduction by the author. New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1987.
Contains Coming of Age in Soho; Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie; and Gemini. ----------. Bizarre Behavior: Six Plays. New York: Avon Books,
1980. Contains Gemini; Ulysses; Transfiguration of Benno
Blimpie; Urlicht; Wisdom Amok;
and Earth Worms. ----------. Coming of Age in Soho. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1985. ---------. Gemini; a play in
two acts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1977. ----------. Gus and Al; a play in
two acts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. ---------. Magda and Callas. New York:
Theater Communications Group, 1989. ---------.
Passione. New York:
Dramatists Play Service, 1981. ----------.
Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie; a play in twelve scenes. New York:
Dramatists Play Service,
1977. ---------
(with Christopher Durang). The Idiots Karamazov. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1981. Secondary sources: Ahearn, Carol Bonomo. "Innaurato and
Pintauro: Two Italian-American Playwrights," MELUS, XVI:3 (fall 1989),
113-125. Davis,
Peter G. "From Minor to Major" (Innaurato's credits for the Mozart Bicentennial at Lincoln Center), New
York,Magazine, September 7,
1992, 54-55. DiGaetani,
John Louis. "An Interview with Albert Innaurato," Studies in American Drama,
1945-Present, II (1987), 87-95. DiScipio, Giuseppe Carlo. "Italian-American Playwrights on the Rise," Journal of Popular Culture,
XIX:3 (winter 1985), 103-108. Franks,
Alan. "A Ride Down Mt.
Miller" (interview with Arthur
Miller), The (London) Times
Saturday Review, November 2, 1991, 56. Guernsey, Otis
L., Jr. and Sweet, Jeffrey (eds.). Burns
Mantle Theater Yearbook;
The Best Plays of
1988-1989, New York:
Applause Theater Book Publishers,
1989; abridged version of Gus and Al,
pages 307-326. Gussow, Mel.
"Innaurato Survives a Period of Adjustment," The New
York Times, February 10, 1985, B-3,
B-14. Lombardi, John.
"Playwrights on the Horizon," The New York Times Magazine, July 17, 1983, 22-31. Oliver,
Edith. "Zaks Rides
Again" (review of Gus and Al,)
New Yorker, March 13, 1989, 74. Rich,
Frank. "Albert
Innaurato's Coming of Age in Soho," The New York Times, February 4, 1985, C-14. ----------.
"Innaurato Befriends
Mahler in Gus and Al," New York Times, February 28, 1989, C-17. Salerno, Henry and Ambrosetti, Ronald. "Ethnic Theatre: Introduction," Journal of Popular Culture, XIX:3
(Winter 1985), 91-93. Simon, John. "Odd Couples, Bizarre Trios" (review of Coming of Age in Soho), New York Magazine, February 18, 1985,
101-103. ----------. "Whose Broadway Is It, Anyway?" (review of Gus and
Al), New York Magazine, March 13, 1989, 74-75. Stone, Elizabeth. "It's Still Hard to Grow Up
Italian," The New York Times
Magazine, December 17, 1978, 90,
93. Biographical sources: "Albert
Innaurato," Current Biography Yearbook,
1988, 263-265. "Albert
Innaurato, 1948?- "
in Contemporary Literary Criticism, LX, 198-208. "Albert
Innaurato," National
Playwrights Directory, 149.
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