[Albert Innaurato] is one of the most brilliant iconoclasts of the American theater. In "Passione," as in "Gemini" and "The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie," Mr. Innaurato pays lip service to kitchen-sink realism, but, for him, reality is merely an elastic means to a cockeyed end. This man is an artist, not a documentarian. He is driven—compulsively, breathlessly—to remake a familiar, even clichéd world into a new and often hilarious place of his own startling design.

"Passione" … is far from a total success, but its first act is vintage Innaurato. It is there that we find the playwright's feverish sensibility twisting a seemingly commonplace ethnic family into all sorts of bizarre shapes….

When [the] extended family gets to eating and bickering in Act I, the surprises and funny lines come so fast that we quickly accept the psychological reality of the characters, however farfetched or grotesque they might otherwise seem. The playwright tries to get away with everything, and he often succeeds. One moment his antagonists draw knives and guns on each other; a little later they pair off and sway romantically to an old Tommy Dorsey record. Mr. Innaurato also thinks nothing of halting the action entirely for impassioned debates about such tangential subjects as women's liberation, television commercials and coffee percolators. These digressions are so passionately and wittily set forth that at times Mr. Innaurato could almost pass for South Philly's half-crazed, proletarian answer to [George Bernard] Shaw.

Still, for all his kamikaze humor, the playwright never condescends to his losers and misfits. He truly likes them, and his infectious compassion is what keeps his fantastic conceits on a human scale. Unfortunately, Mr. Innaurato's big heart is also the source of his greatest esthetic failing. When, in Act II, he tries to resolve the homely specifics of the family's dilemmas, he simply cannot find a way to assimilate such prosaic matters into his high-flying, operatic comic style. "Passione" soon devolves into an ordinary domestic drama—one that sits very uneasily on what has come before.

Disappointingly enough, much of Act II consists of heart-to-heart conversations in which the characters confront one another, rehash the past and make amends. Suddenly the relatively minor character of Little Tom is launching into dramatically unearned monologues about his suicide attempts. Suddenly Aggy and Berto are recapping their marital history in somber words that merely repeat information that had been conveyed comically earlier on. Sarah and Renzo's final confrontation works better because it springs from the play's farcical underpinnings: they consummate their relationship in a wild, if overextended, slapstick boxing match.

Mr. Innaurato had a parallel difficulty in "Gemini," whose serious love triangle was at odds with the play's more outrageous shenanigans, but he finessed it better there. The introspective interludes were more adeptly interwoven, and the central plot question was left unresolved. In "Passione," the playwright seems, if anything, overly possessed by his generous emotions. He is too eager to reconcile his play's family, no matter what the price in narrative credibility, and he is too quick to have his characters endorse his own credo of tolerance. When a mother's attitude toward her son changes from rage to affection in an instant, the patness of such a transformation saps its pathos. Some lines of dialogue—"When you love somebody, you got to let them be what they are"—state the play's theme rather than dramatize it….

Fat Francine is the only character who successfully rides all of Mr. Innaurato's moods. In Act I, she erupts in one of the playwright's inimitable arias: a foul-mouthed defense of obesity that goes to the outer limits of farce without ever losing touch with genuine feeling. In Act II, her circumspect dissection of her marriage is the one quiet scene that works: she goes for our emotional jugular without ever forsaking her initial comic beat. From Francine, we can extrapolate that Innaurato play that is entirely faithful to its creator's remarkable vision. If "Passione" is not that play, it nonetheless keeps the promise alive.