Albert Innaurato was born and reared in Philadelphia, the son of Italian immigrants. The ethnic world of south Philadelphia provides the background for his most successful plays. Though precise autobiographical parallels have not been revealed by Innaurato, the events and characters in the plays are transformations of his own experiences and acquaintances. His portrayals of Italian American life are sufficiently realistic that Innaurato’s opinions about ethnic identity have been sought out by reporters.

Many of Innaurato’s plays were begun when he was quite young; a version of Urlicht, for example, dates from his late teens. He continued to write prolifically during his undergraduate years at Temple University, where he received his B.A. Many of these early works were lost or destroyed, though some of the titles are known. Innaurato develops scripts rather slowly, so some of the material may eventually surface again in new plays.

Perhaps the most persistent early influence on Innaurato was his taste for opera. He taught himself to play the piano and made some early experiments in operatic composition, but its influence lingers mostly through frequent allusions to opera in plays such as Gemini and in the leitmotif structure of the plays, which also feature set speeches designed as arias. Innaurato collects opera recordings and has written about his fascination with the form for The New York Times.

After attending Temple University, an experience transposed into Ulysses in Traction, the young writer spent a year at the California Institute of the Arts. His education there was unsettling, causing him to question his assumptions about art, politics, and society, and he left the school to return to the East Coast.

During the early 1970’s, Innaurato studied playwriting at Yale University under Howard Stein and Jules Feiffer. The discipline of regular writing and constructive feedback seems to have provided an unusually productive routine for Innaurato, who developed his serious dramatic talents in plays such as Earth Worms. Feiffer’s influence seems important to Innaurato’s development as a satirist, too—his concern for grotesque, seriocomic characters who exist beyond social conventions.

Equally important to Innaurato’s development at Yale was his association with Christopher Durang. The two young writers shared a virulent anti-Catholicism, most concisely demonstrated in the famous monologue by the title character of Durang’s play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (pr. 1979). Durang is more important to Innaurato for having collaborated with him on a number of madcap comic satires. The ridiculous mayhem of Gemini does not seem eccentric in Innaurato’s uvre when considered in relation to plays such as The Idiots Karamazov, I Don’t Generally Like Poetry but Have You Read “Trees”?, and The Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor: Or, Gyp, all written during the Yale years with Durang. These works also provided the experience with allusions and the manipulation of theatrical conventions that Innaurato used later in Ulysses in Traction.

In 1974, Innaurato was graduated from Yale with a master of fine arts degree in playwriting. He had also directed and acted in some of the plays, which even in their student productions featured talented, capable casts. His work was published in Yale’s Theater magazine and was produced by the Yale Repertory Theatre. Some of his plays also received readings and critical feedback at the Yale summer session, the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights’ Conference.

In 1975, Innaurato received a Guggenheim Fellowship and began his career as a full-time playwright. The first production of Gemini , at the PAF playhouse in Huntington, Long Island, was so successful that a subsequent production was arranged at the Circle Rep....