Albert Innaurato, whose early play Gemini ran on Broadway from 1977 through 1981 and was adapted as both a feature and television film, has died. Deadline confirmed that he was found dead Tuesday at home in Philadelphia; the precise date of death had not yet been determined. For much of his adult life, he had been challenged with significant health issues.
Innaurato was an artist who, both literally and intellectually, cut a larger-than-life figure in the worlds of theater and opera. His talents included not only the writing of plays – notably The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie, Coming of Age In Soho, Passione, and Gus and Al in addition to Gemini – but also teaching the craft of his work, sharing his encyclopedic and unreservedly biased knowledge of opera and its practitioners, reluctantly writing screenplays and teleplays, and retailing insights, commentary, gossip and observations that ran the gamut from fawning to blood-letting on web sites, in letters to the editor and occasionally in keen-eyed journalism.
Gemini (the 1980 feature film with Madeline Kahn and Rita Moreno was re-titled Happy Birthday, Gemini) tells the story of Francis, a recent Harvard grad who returns to his blue-collar Philadelphia home, when sibling Cambridge classmates Judith and Randy show up to help him celebrate his 21st birthday. Judith has eyes for Francis who, much to his own discomfiture, discovers he has eyes for Randy, leading him to come out by the end of the play.
After productions at Playwrights Horizons and the Circle Repertory, Gemini transferred to Broadway's Little Theatre (now the Helen Hayes), where it settled in for a long run. Much like Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, which would take over the same theater just a few years later, Gemini's still-risqué gay theme became a kind of sympathetic underscoring to the larger, time-honored Broadway value of familial love trumping traditional social constraints, and the show – egged on by a ubiquitous TV and radio ad campaign – was embraced by Broadway ticket buyers.
In some respects, Innaurato never recovered from the sensational success of Gemini; he never produced a comparable hit.
Nevertheless, Innaurato's output was prodigious, as he eked out a living teaching playwriting in Philadelphia, writing for such seminal television series as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and churning out plays that featured outcasts, losers, whiners, unsung geniuses, frustrated artists and all-around loners (an early collection of them is grouped under the title Bizarre Behavior). He wrote from personal experience, as with Gus and Al, in which a character named Albert goes back in time to chew the fat with Gustav Mahler, and he wrote out of jealousy or vengeance (his off-Broadway play Doubtless was an acid splash in the face to fellow Catholic playwright John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt).
Innaurato had a supportive home at several nonprofit theaters. André Bishop was the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and took him under the company's wing.