The two plays that are being produced together under the collective title of Monsters have a common theme: the child as freak. But the difference between Albert Innaurato's The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie and William Dews's Side Show is the difference between a real playwright's use of this theme and a wordsmith's clever juggling with it.

Benno Blimpie is a naturalistic family play transposed into the realm of the grotesque, like one of those Jack Levine or Ivan Albright paintings that, walked by casually in a museum, appears to be an innocent urban landscape; only on closer inspection does one see the bleakness of the landscape, the rotting flesh of the figures: The freak emerges naturally from a world that, looked at in a certain light, suddenly seems freakish itself….

Benno Blimpie, though the picture it paints is of total squalor, deals with that squalor honestly….

It is Innaurato's literary sensibility that rescues Benno's story from banal naturalism or Hubert Selbyish clinicality—a matter of stylistic heightening. The cheap squabbling of the parents and the sordid flirtations of the grandfather are turned, by a writer's combination of the overheard and the unexpected, into moments that carry compassion and contempt, pained objectivity and bitter comedy. The naturalistic elements are all in place, but beneath them is heard the violent scream of the grotesque, intensifying everything and making it harsher. Benno's grandiose monologues, similarly, are given their full value in grandeur—this is how he transcends the squalid world around him—without losing any of their pathetic comedy as the hysterical expressions of a badly frightened boy. (p. 81)

[What] emerges from Benno's squalor and freakishness can at least be called dignity, if not tragedy. (p. 83)