[Albert Innaurato is] the most interesting young playwright to emerge on the New York scene in the past ten years….

No one is safe from his barbed wit [onstage]—no racial or ethnic group (including his own, which is Italian), no physical type, no sexual type. This is particularly true with his new work, Ulysses in Traction….

The whole "sexuality question" was first raised by Gemini…. It centers on the sexual crisis of a young twenty-one-year old Harvard student who can't relate to his admittedly beautiful girlfriend because he thinks he has a crush on her younger brother. The crush remains platonic, though when the boy dares him to consummate the pent-up desire, our hero is more than willing to try, except that the brother chickens out at the moment of truth. Sister and brother then pack their tent and leave, and the hero, realizing that he can't live without them, rushes after them as the curtain falls and his father states, "I think they're going to make it." We still don't know who's going to make it, however; or, more specifically, whom/which the hero is going to make it with—which is the nicest touch of all….

Innaurato's plays are all about outcasts—people with weight problems and pimples (either physical or psychic), people with missing limbs, people who simply don't fit into the "real" world of middle-class America….

Maybe what it boils down to is that Innaurato writes about the little people, the losers, the loners—the kind of people we meet in Robert Altman films or see chasing flying saucers in [Steven Speilberg's] Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Us, maybe, and ninety percent of the people we know? And he doesn't glamorize them, doesn't protect them, doesn't pussyfoot around about their insecurities, their hatreds, their prejudices….

There are three controversial subject areas in [Ulysses in Traction:] academic theater;… black militancy; and homosexuality. Again? Yes. And in this case the gay character is, in Innaurato's own words, "an unsympathetic character who is a militant homosexual." Militant may not be exactly the right term. He's a swish, a ninny, a classic self-hating gay who covers up his inadequacies, which have little to do with his sexuality, by camping and preening and delivering self-consciously "bitchy" putdowns….

Not being able to come, or even get it up, for whatever internal or external reasons, is a continuing metaphor in Innaurato's plays, and it's particularly important here, where the hero … can't do either because of a chronic infection of the urinary tract. Ironically, his impotence gives him a kind of levelheadedness that makes him the most sane spokesman in the play on the three touchy questions, especially the one about homosexuality. When the aging fairy type (and once again I stress, this is a characterization that this type of person has chosen for himself—his escape, if you will—not a stigma that Innaurato or I have inflicted on him) talks about seducing him when the lights go out (as the race riot gets closer and closer), the blond says: "I don't suppose there is anything wrong with homosexuality in the abstract, but anything that breeds that level of inhumanity and superficiality is disgusting."

The racial questions raised by the play are even touchier. I can think of no subject more difficult to broach, even objectively, on a New York stage at the current time than this one of black terrorism—unless it would be Israeli aggression, expressed in anything other than the most hysterically vicious anti-Arab terms. No, the New York "liberal" press is hardly willing to see its platitudes undercut by realities, since the realities don't conform with the careful structure of those platitudes. This is why Albert Innaurato is a revolutionary, though I doubt he would ever define himself as such.