Sincerity Forever.

Mac Wellman is one of the most elusive and most impressive playwrights in America. A playgoer who wants to see what he is up to has to keep a sharp eye out for off-off-Broadway listings and move quickly before the productions fold their tents and quietly fade away. Sincerity Forever was recently and briefly back in New York in a reasonably effective production by the Nevermore Theatre Project, a new company which describes itself as "dedicated to expanding the ambition and scope of noncommercial contemporary theater." That sounds like Wellman territory.

When Sincerity Forever first appeared at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 1990, it was cited by the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) as one of the outstanding new plays of the 1990-91 season. Its first New York production, by the late lamented BACA Downtown in Brooklyn, picked up two Obies and a citation from Mel Gussow in his Off-Off-Broadway roundup in The Applause/Best Plays Theater Yearbook, 1990-91. That volume, as the series regularly does with ATCA choices, printed a sample of the play, the last long denunciatory speech by Jesus H. Christ, a speech which Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) called "a four-letter version of the Sermon on the Mount_" Not a bad description, but the self-styled legislative moralist did not mean it as a compliment; he called the play "yet another NEA outrage." The National Endowment for the Arts, which had given Wellman a playwrighting grant, asked him to remove NEA credit from the play which, with typical graciousness, he did, adding a note to the script saying that the play "was not made possible by the generous assistance of the NEA. I don't know what I was thinking." Despite the original critical reception of the play and the whiff of scandal surrounding it, it had pretty much disappeared until the Nevermore production.

The immediate point of Sincerity Forever is that the characters, who are at once high-school students and members of the Invisible Nation (they wear KKK-style costumes that unfortunately make them look like the Coneheads), readily proclaim their own sincerity and see it as a virtue which validates their ignorance and their dangerous narrowmindedness. This is a familiar Wellman theme, voiced in various imaginative conceits--a conviction of what, as Jesus H. Christ says, "a/sorry place this world is, what with all the jive/ass bullslinging, and endless justifying." Their sincerity speeches, full of American optimism, are invaded and subverted by the presence of "Two Mystic Furballs of the Tribe of Abadddon and Belial," negation figures. Christ, who in this production is a black woman (a black man when the play was first done), has come to drive out the furballs and to denounce the insularity of the characters. Her last long speech, which for all its vernacular eloquence begins to sound too overtly didactic, is saved by a last Wellman twist. As she exits, presumably leaving them stunned and enlightened, one of the characters, still mirror-obsessed, not doubting in whose image God was created, says, "Who was that African-American woman?"

There is never any doubt that Wellman's plays are about something in the most serious sense of aboutness, but the mark of his work is his language. Here he uses two styles: the bromidic everyday language of the high schoolers, a mixture of dating gossip and philosophic maundering, and the vital, violent, obscene diatribes of the furballs, denunciatory catalogues that become a kind of demented poetry. He plays verbal tricks within the two styles. The play consists primarily of two-character scenes, school chums or couples talking in a parked car. As the play goes on, the conversations begin to invade one another. One fatuous scene between a boy and girl is redone word-for-word with two boys and takes on a totally different tone. Obscene phrases from the furballs turn up in otherwise innocuous exchanges among the teen-agers, and even the furballs find themselves succumbing to protestations of sincerity.

It is a rich and challenging Wellman brew.