Theater: Italo-Boffo

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PASSIONE by Albert Innaurato

If a rat designed a kitchen, this would be it. Everything is dingy, dirty, tattletale gray. The refrigerator, the table, the washer—name it—it is dusty and either sags or tilts. At stage left is the adjoining bedroom, crammed with cardboard boxes.

Like a canny Hollywood factotum, Playwright Innaurato has followed Gemini with Gemini II. Again, he writes about an Italo-American clan at warmer than room temperature. The emotionally suppurating wounds are redder than the red badge of self-exonerating cowardice.

Again, rollicking ethnic humor is couched in lacerating ethnic self-contempt. Someone ought to write a term paper investigating why almost all of the great U.S. comics on radio, stage, screen or TV come from ethnic enclaves.

The plot line: Aggy (Angela Paton), ex-Wife from hillbilly country, remeets ex-Husband Berto (Jerry Stiller), a failed inventor. Her ostensible purpose is repossession of mingy personal belongings. Her real purpose: repossession of Hubby, a toasty-warm, sentimental, well-endowed Mediterranean stud.

Among those who provide percussive laughter, note well Aggy's Ozark sister Sarah (Sloane Shelton). Some gratuitous violence mars Passione, but the chances are that Innaurato's play, now at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons Theater, will prove to be a long-term boxoffice hit. —T.E.K.