On Stage

...The mother is an embittered drudge, the father has become impotent from sundry frustrations, the grandfather takes up with a vicious nymphet who eventually kills him, and Benno, after relating numerous dismal experiences and vengeful fantasies—some of them grimly funny—castrates himself with a cleaver...

...Reed Birney's Randy—somewhat silly, faintly spoiled, yet basically amiable and obliging—is splendid in his frivolity that flirts with but resists shallowness...

...the other is occupied by Bunny Weinberger, a buxom, brash, foul-mouthed, prejudiced, wise-cracking but unhappy Irishwoman whose Jewish husband walked out years ago, and by her fat son Herschel, a weirdo whose passion is subways, buses and trolley cars, and who acts retarded despite an allegedly high IQ...

...I cannot begin to itemize the various plot elements that Innaurato neatly weaves together...

...One is inhabited by Fran Geminiani, an Italian printer whose wasp wife has long since left him, and his son Francis, on vacation from Harvard...

...The best performance comes from Miss De Angelis, whose very shrieks have a terrible lucidity, and whose transitions from pathos to violence and back again are absolutely seamless...

...Meanwhile, the kids similarly head for mutual exasperation: Judith through her imperious, not a little egotistic passion for Francis...

...it is preceded by a shorter one-acter, Side by Side, from the pen of William Dews...

...There is, along with some whopping cliches, a good deal of precocious wisdom here as long as the characters are not nudged into melodramatic exaggeration or farcical excess...

...Francis with his attraction-repulsion for Judith and long-repressed craving for Randy...

...Ashamed of his ambience, Francis wants them to leave...

...and Gemini, a full-length piece, at the Circle Repertory Company's premises...

...It is not the most appetizing of plays...

...This concerns teen-aged male Siamese twins who have been steadily exploited by their callous parents and who celebrate their last birthday by first killing their progenitors, then having a jolly vaudeville-style party with them during which they recapitulate their seamy past, and finally killing themselves as well...

...Francis, profoundly at odds with his raffish background, is unexpectedly visited by Randy and Judith Hastings, a wealthy upper-class brother and sister, friends of his from Harvard and Radcliffe, who pitch a tent in the yard...

...but Peter Carew is a monotonous dirty old man, and K. McKenna a nymphet so uncouth as to be scant temptation for the most oversexed geezer...

...Benno's monologues have a certain grandeur—on the bordei between the bleak and the baroque —but they go too far...

...the father remains sketchy, and the grandfather and nymphet are dose to grisly caricatures...

...but failure is failure, however high the stakes...

...Randy with his clumsy attempt at reciprocating Francis' desire that ends in fiasco and an unsatisfying ofter of platonic friendship...

...And why isn't slow death by overeating enough without hauling in the meat cleaver for a final low blow...

...Herschel through his grotesque adoration for Randy who both scorns and pities him...

...For example, the account of how Benno finds perverse happiness when several of his rowdy, jeering classmates force him to perform fellatio would be sordid enough if it stopped there...

...Especially as incarnated by Rosemary De Angelis, this creature has more vital fascination than Benno himself...

...There are certain (possibly autobiographical) correspondences between Gemini, a na-uralistic comedy with serious overtones, and Benno, a stylized drama with comic undercurrents...

...There is also Bunny's yearning for Randy, and Fran's not entirely sexless affection for Judith, and everybody's ganging up on the hapless Herschel...

...But during the action-fraught two-day visit, it emerges that Francis is truly enamored of Randy, a pleasantly unintellectual freshman concerned chiefly with building up his delicate body, for whom Herschel also develops a ludicrous infatuation...

...This is sheer Grand Guignol, the worse for some added cuteness and pretentiousness...

...this, combined with fluent technique, proclaims her one of the few genuinely appealing young actresses in our theater, where true women are the greatest rarity...

...Even more interesting than the interactions within each age group are those that cross over: the father-and-son relationship of strangulated love between Fran and Francis, the mother-and-son love-hate between Bunny and Herschel, and a curious quasi-mother-and-daughter relation that develops between Lucille and Judith, the girl first sneering at the older woman's inept aspirations to gentility, then gradually coming to respect her canniness...

...And Carol Potter is a marvelous Judith: an overindulged, clever young girl who grows into bewildered womanhood before our eyes...

...Two of his works are now on view off-Broadway: The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie, a long one-acter at the Astor Place Theater...

...Danny Aiello's Fran is a superbly rounded characterization, bringing out without inconsistency the strength and helplessness of the man, his sober insights and childlike innocence, his slightly awkward banter and carefully tucked away inner ache...

...Each character has his or her little drama that interacts with that of one or two others more or less comically...

...Fran, delighted with their presence, overrides him and makes them stay...

...but we have to hear also about how they stuffed bits of broken glass into his mouth, ravaging what they ravished...

...He has failed only in pushing some already un-subtle comedic bits even farther toward farce...

...Hanging around, too, is Luoille Pompi, the widowed neighbor who is Fran's mistress...

...The three older people's lives are filled with disappointments and frustrations that they handle differently and with varying efficiency...

...Benno is the more ambitious work, with the fat protagonist both literally and figuratively at the center, seated on a high platform whence he does not move, and where, as he says, he is eating himself to death...

...They manage this reasonably well, though they too are rather older and thus less innocently heartbreaking than the characters they portray...

...But when Innaurato reaches for poetic effects—as when all the characters, as if in a trance, take turns uttering the name of some meat dish in a supposedly symbolic litany of comestibles—the result is in no way affecting...

...Granted, nothing is harder than fusing realism and poetic stylization...

...Miss Potter brings a wealth of natural attractiveness and charm to the role, but admirably plays against them...

...Worse yet, Innaurato has tacked onto this revised version of Gemini a preposterous multiple happy ending that seems to be an ill-considered bid for adoption by Broadway . Nevertheless, young Peter Mark Schiffer has directed with a nice sense of placement, movement and gradual or swift transition, making the most both of the outbursts of violence and the intermittently glimpsed sadness at the core...

...The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie is the main item on a double bill called Monsters...

...But to return to Innaurato: Gemini is a much more satisfactory work than Benno—not because it is more amusing and less gory, but because it is in a straightforward, realistic vein that, as of now, comes easier to the author...

...Drivas directed this double bill competently enough, particularly given the tininess of the stage and the minimum of material resources...

...Both plays feature a well-meaning but ineffectual father, a mother who feels put upon by the world and takes it out on her fat son, and a homosexual element...

...Benno is played by James Coco, a fine fat aotor who, alas, is some 35 years too old for the part and, for all his sincerity and skill, an intolerable strain on our credulity...

...more importantly, it is less than absorbing...

...On Stage PLAYWRIGHT, LEARN WHERE TO STOP by john simon MUCH Is being made these days of Albert Innaurato, the young playwright—born in Philadelphia in 1948, holder of a 1974 MFA from Yale—who has had various prestigious grants and productions in good little playhouses...

...It does, however, allow its cast of two, Richard De Fabees and Robert Drivas, to move from slapstick to song-and-dance routines to absurdist comedy all the way to melodramatic pathos...

...With the exception of Jonathan Hadary, whose Herschel is too epicene of voice and gesture, and who is much too old for the part, the cast does well enough, and three performances are outstanding...

...We are in a back yard shared by two shabby South Philadelphia houses...

...ut of these strands Innaurato weaves an attractive tapestry, lacking perhaps in transcendent originality, but fraught with finely observed behavioral mannerisms, idiosyncracies of speech, and tricky emotional entanglements...

...There is decent support from Roger Serbagi as her husband...

...Of the supporting characters, only the alternately furi-bund and despairing mother is sufficiently developed...

...Actually, he had a brief affair with Judith, a fellow overachiever, with whom he has a lot in common...

...For the father is worried about his boy who will be 21 tomorrow without, it seems, having had a real girlfriend...

...There are moments of genuine power here, notably in the outbursts of Benno's mother, a character both wronged and provoking, whose complexity keeps us teetering between horror and laughter,' contempt and sympathy...

...In other words, the play has a generally sensitive and accurate middle range, and errs mostly by not knowing where to stop: by overexplicitness or overextension toward one extreme or another...

...While he shlurps, drools and slops food all over himself, he presents little stylistically heightened vignettes in which his family act out their piteous tales, talking to him as if he were down there with them while he responds (or doesn't respond) from up high...