If allusions a play made, Albert Innaurato's Ulysses in Traction would be the hit of the off-Broadway season, instead of the puny and lifeless affair that it is. Along with the title's bow to Homer and James Joyce, there are references, verbal or visual, to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear, [Anton] Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, [Luigi] Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Gunter Grass' The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising. Doubtless there were others, but the tedious catch-the-writer-quoting game should be saved for English professors. The theatergoer deserves to be enlightened, or at least entertained, not quizzed. And by that test Ulysses fails miserably. When not busy climbing onto the backs of the literary giants, it is clubbing its audience with half-baked Big Ideas, vulgar melodrama and whopping clichés.

"Existence is strife" is the gist of Innaurato's message. (p. 28)

[His] hackneyed conception is matched by hackneyed characters. Actually, they are less characters than caricatures, problems or traumas incarnate…. Lest we think Innaurato's assessment of humanity is completely dour, he has given us a foil: Mae, the black cleaning woman. She is gritty and down to earth, as blacks are wont to be when whites create them, and to her belongs the uncertain distinction of describing the road out of the surrounding Sturm and Drang: "And between us—we'll find something to praise…. That's the music of every inch of our insides, praising this life!"

No, that's bathos of the rankest kind, rendered fouler for being uttered by a patently phoney character. Innaurato's earlier works, The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie and Gemini, also had their false moments, but these were overwhelmed by a genuine power, plus the urgency of a voice that had a great deal to say. In Ulysses urgency and content have everywhere been replaced by pseudo-profundity. Take, for example, the opening scene—the play-within-a-play. This time-honored device invariably has been used, first, to rouse the audience from its stolid belief in a distinction between drama and life, dreaming and waking, madness and sanity, illusion and reality; and, second, to illuminate the larger action. Innaurato includes it hoping to whet our appetite for serious drama, or perhaps to prove he did not receive his MFA for nothing. Yet the device, once introduced, is rapidly shorn of its purposes and degenerates into an extended—albeit funny—parody of David Rabe and Ron Cowen.

Innaurato is more loyal to the subject of homosexuality; indeed, he rarely misses a chance to drag it in. Hence, when insults are to be landed, the coup de grâce is delivered below the belt. The longest scene, moreover, pits the limp-wristed Lenny against the merely limp John. And Ulysses' sole functioning heterosexuals, Doris and Steve, are its sole truly unlikeable characters as well. Homosexuality is so important to Innaurato, in fact, that he has provided a discussion of whether American theater is dominated by "nihilistic faggots" who write because "they can't come." Despite this energy spent telling us that homosexuality is a crucial issue, the climax of the play incredibly insists that sexuality does not count; we are all brothers. Such willed bonhomie can possibly be explained as bid to get to Broadway, although even the Great White Way's patrons, willing to put up with anything if it is cloying enough, would be hard pressed to sit through Ulysses. (pp. 28-9)