Let me hope that Albert Innaurato intends his Passione to be farce with some serious overtones rather than a significant statement about life couched in farcical terms. Taken as pure knockabout farce—with one character literally knocked all over the stage—Passione gives modest but fairly consistent delight, the wild swings made up for by riotous haymakers. But when it goes serious, it has serious problems.

The play covers familiar Innaurato territory topographically, emotionally, gastronomically. Once again we are in Italo-American South Philadelphia; once again everything from lovemaking to making coffee is done with brio, bravura, pepperoni, or some other hot Italian ingredient; once again eating and drinking become a physical and metaphysical consummation, with the thinnest of lines between passionate consuming and consuming passions….

Everyone then is slightly defective—missing fingers, excess fat …; or a disappointment—the educated Tom, a clown, the inventive Berto, a failed cabbie; or laboring under a criminal past—Oreste's arson, Renzo's heists. And the southern ladies' superiority is revealed as bravado or funny truculence merely cloaking loneliness. But defects and shortcomings are the entrance tickets into the grand symbiosis of compassion that finally makes the walking wounded walk into the haven of one another's arms.

Unfortunately, the play does not really dramatize this charity that leads to love, this love that generates passion (or vice versa), even though we are told: "First you've got to let 'em find out what they are. Then you've got to let 'em be that. That's lovin'." I hear it, but I am not shown it. And we are shown even less in this new, streamlined Broadway production…. The [earlier,] longer, fuller version, despite some excesses, allowed these bizarre but human creatures to achieve their full, human density and believability. The cramped stage made the play, as it were, burst at the seams—an objective correlative for the explosive aspirations and frustrations that the characters are so powerless to contain.

On Broadway, the thinnesses become more apparent; the haste to wrap up everything turns, in the second act, frantic, and an uncomfortable, by-the-numbers quality sets in. The disorderly passions of Albert Innaurato cannot take so much tightening and tidying up: The nice thing about a stable (among other nice things) is that it is neither a production line nor a salon. (p. 75)

I suppose the best thing about Passione is that its characters are so palpably droll that they can make even their less funny lines beget laughs in context. Francine taunting Tom that he might have married "a nice blond girl who don't give you no lip—only she won't give you no head, neither," and Tom's reply, "This is the eighties—everybody gives head!" might not seem to be particularly amusing. But in that fat, sassy, juicily alive onstage ambience, it is, it is. (p. 76)