Albert Innaurato is too young to be cannibalizing himself, even if eating and overeating are leitmotifs in his dramaturgy. In Passione, he is at it again….

The seven characters passionately love, hate, or love and hate one another. The play is taken up with bouts of lovemaking, fisticuffs, and eating of every sort, from the most voracious to the barely nibbling. There is also conspicuous consumption of wine and coffee. Gutter philosophy and bed-sheet dialectics abound. Haters become lovers and vice versa; friends fall out vehemently and are vehemently reconciled. Everyone blames everyone else for having ruined his life. Or for having saved it…. It is all full of every kind of Italian, or Italo-American, or stage-Italo-American, passion—or passione—and the dialogue is racy, absurd, obscene, and sometimes quite funny.

In calmer moments, there is genuine wistfulness. And there are the obligatory reversals: The failures have their dignity and strength; the successes, their anxieties and grinding needs. Tenderness comes out violent; fights turn into acts of love. It's not exactly unpredictable, as it recapitulates previous Innaurato plays. If it does not nourish your soul, it does tickle your soles and clutch at your heart. Though often inordinately coarse, its vulgarity has a redeeming touch of originality, a twist of eccentricity, that lifts it above the morass. Frequently exasperating, Passione is nearly saved by its crazy gusto, by respect for the imaginative intemperance with which some people—Italians, Italo-Americans, or stage-Italo-Americans—operaticize the prosiness around, and even within, them….

Passione hangs, in the words of a canzone by Tasso, tra l'arte e la natura incerta—between art and dubious nature—or even between dubious nature and uncertain art. One observes it with mixed wonder and weariness as it fluctuates between Verdi and Leoncavallo, between real people and stage Italo-Americans. (p. 58)