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The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie

The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie
Your Price: $15.95 CDN
Author: Albert Innaurato
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service (cover may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 37
Pub. Date: 1998
Edition: Acting
ISBN-10: 082221167X
ISBN-13: 9780822211679
Cast Size: 2 female, 3 male

About the Play:

The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie is a one-act comedic drama by Albert Innaurato. Unloved and cruelly abused by his family and society, a teenager has decided to eat himself to death. Dealing with the twisted lives of people who are considered "freaks" by others, The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie finds humour, as well as powerful compassion, in its harrowing recital of their plight.

The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie is a nightmarish account of a lonely, obese young man's rendezvous with self-mutilation. Benno Blimpie is an enormously fat and desperately unhappy teenager who is literally eating himself to death. Rejected by his coarse family, and a world which holds him in contempt, Benno watches bitterly as the history of his life is played out in scene after scene around him. His foul-mouthed, unloving mother; his gross, derisive father; his sex-obsessed grandfather, who courts disaster with a teenaged nymphet – all subject him to derision and scorn. Trapped beneath Benno's gross exterior there is a sensitive and feeling person, with needs that cry out for fulfillment. But he learns that a love of beauty is not enough and, trapped within his ugliness, he can only shut himself away and methodically eat himself into oblivion. By doing so he feels he will escape the inequities of life and transfigure himself into something worthy of love. The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie is a searing, sometimes shocking, brilliantly conceived black comedy by a writer of major importance.

The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie was first presented in 1973 at the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Center, and later performed off-off-Broadway at the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) and the Direct Theatre. In 1977 it had an acclaimed off-Broadway run at the Astor Place Theatre, earning Albert Innaurato an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding New American Play. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"This evening is strong stuff, but good stuff." — New York Times

"There is a fresh and powerful new voice in the theatre." — New York Post

"…stuns and shatters. Bold, haunting and thoroughly compelling. It's what great plays are all about." — New York Daily News

"Despite the awful rawness of the work, there is a lyrical poetry in Benno's dispassionate account of the horrors that brought him to his final decision. Innaurato's point is his denouncement of social acceptance by appearance. Inside Benno is a saintly spirit...." — The Baltimore Sun

About the Playwright:

Albert Francis Innaurato Jr. (1947-2017) was an American playwright, theatre director, and writer. He graduated from Temple University as a theatre major. From there he went to the California Institute of the Arts and then to the Yale School of Drama during its 1970s golden age, when his classmates included actors Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver, and fellow playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang. The most successful of all his plays, Gemini, ran on Broadway for five years. It remains today as the fourth-longest running play in Broadway history. He wrote many more plays, though none of these titles matched the success of Gemini. He also wrote screenplays for television and film, adapted operas, and contributed to newspapers and magazines.

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