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The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie
The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie
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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
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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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