Word: gemini
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Like a canny Hollywood factotum, Playwright Innaurato has followed Gemini with Gemini II. Again, he writes about an Italo-American clan at warmer than room temperature. The emotionally suppurating wounds are redder than the red badge of self-exonerating cowardice...
ALBERT INNAURATO'S Gemini begins with a deafening blast of construction, a counter-blast of Maria Callas and a volley of shrieks and screams. The protagonist, Francis Geminiani, a Harvard junior back home in Philadelphia for the summer, leans out his second-story window, plants a speaker on the sill in a grand gesture of defiance, and blares an opera record to combat the 7 a.m. assault. This awakens his obese next-door neighbor, Bunny Weinberger, who throws open her second-story window and screeches at him to "turn off that shitty music." Besides, she yells, one of those workers...
...Gemini depicts two days in Francis's life, using his 21st birthday and the unexpected arrival of his rich, WASP girlfriend and her brother, both from Harvard, as an occasion for Big Scenes--confrontations, explosions, parties, reminiscences and attempts at suicide. It is a comedy steeped in pain and bathos, a marvelous, overpowering--yet enormously funny--spectacle of man's capacity for self-dramatization...
...Gemini is deeply personal, and the play's primary impact is on the emotions. Even surrounded by excessive babbling and posturing, the moments of genuine, unvarnished feeling have a lucidity that carries them effortlessly out of the mess. (I knew Herschel's gentle rhapsody on his life's passion, trolley cars, was important because it made me cry.) All those piled-up absurdities emit enough shocks of recognition to power a theaterful of electric chairs...
...made it through another day without too much damage; unable to elevate themselves, they keep their balance, and even do their bit to keep someone else from toppling--if no one can invade like a relative, no one can be there as fast with the ambulance. The spirit of Gemini is very precious, and its hero is the Drama: it makes these trivial people very grand, renders the corniest platitudes heroic and profound, and gives us insight into those big and little dramas we enact every day, performing to keep the cold...