Stage Animal on the Prowl

By T.E.Kalem

GEMINI

by ALBERT INNAURATO

The play of middling merit fills an evening; the play of lasting merit fills a void. Subtly, or drastically, high drama alters our perception of existence. In this decade, up to now, the most promising young dramatists all seem to fall within the confines of middling merit. What knits some recent playwrights together more excitingly than their works is a sense that they are stage animals prowling their natural and necessary habitat. One such prowling indigene is Albert Innaurato, 28.

In his full-length off-Broadway entry, Gemini, he seems most at ease behind the mask of comedy. The setting is a birthday-party reunion in a South Philadelphia backyard between Papa Geminiani (Danny Aiello), who proudly displays the stigmata of the lower middle class, and his 21-year-old Harvard-educated son, Francis (Robert Picardo). To make the culture gap wider, two of Francis' friends drop in unexpectedly from Cambridge, a brother-sister duo of unblemished Wasp credentials--or "white people" in Papa's olive-pure lingo. Francis goes into a panic of sexual ambivalence. The sister (Carol Potter) is crazy about him and Francis is queer for her brother (Reed Birney), or so he fears. What ensues, with no little assistance from some wacky neighbors, is a zinging display of comic fireworks, most of which explode underfoot.

In an artfully accomplished cast, Anne DeSalvo probably rates a golden pasta award as a diet-conscious Italian widow with the table manners of a seagull when it comes to other people's plates. Gemini is the kind of play the early William Saroyan might have enjoyed or, for that matter, written.

To see Albert Innaurato's sensibility operating from a totally different angle of vision, one needs to attend his one-acter The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie, which is part of a double bill called Monsters at off-Broadway's Astor Place Theater. In contrast to Gemini, Blimpie is as joyous as a bleeding welt. It is a lacerating look at adolescence from the freakish vantage point of a boy of 14 who weighs 500 lbs.

Yet Benno Blimpie (James Coco) is no freak in spirit. In his desperate need for love, his touching vulnerability, and his wistful desire for the approval of other children, he is linked to every human being who ever has been or ever will be born. His mother (Rosemary De Angelis), an embittered witch, treats Benno like scum and heaps epithets on him like offal. His father (Roger Serbagi) does not hate Benno, but one minute is about the attention span of his concern, so it comes to the same thing. Denied, neglected, degraded by everyone he turns to, Benno devours ice cream and cups of custard and fulfills his own prophecy: "I am eating myself to death."

Somehow James Coco redeems a role that skirts the emotional breaking point and tests the border of the intolerable. Like an obscene Buddha of bloat, he is seated and immobile at center stage. He can use only his face, his voice and his hands to convey scalding inner pain, the shame of incessant humiliation, a wry humor that disguises itself as self-mocking wrath and a shyly proffered love that he knows will be drowned like an unwanted kitten. Directed with unswerving authority by Robert Drivas, James Coco has reached the pinnacle of his career as a poignant martyr of fat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.