Sincerity Forever

Here's a little beef of mine: David Mamet gets all this attention for being some great master of dialogue, when in fact there are plenty of other contemporary playwrights out there doing pretty amazing things with language, and not in nearly so formulaic a fashion. Take Mac Wellman, whose 1990 play Sincerity Forever makes something entirely fresh out of one of Mamet's favorite devices: endless repetition of simple phrases (many of them commonly considered obscene). Most of the characters in this brief (under an hour) show are ostensibly smalltown Klansmen, but they behave like horny high school students while simultaneously addressing the Big Questions of existence itself. (Spoiler: the answers to those questions involve potty-mouthed furballs.) "Life is so mystical sometimes," one of them says during one of many moments that seems straight out of an updated remake of Our Town (albeit an NC-17 remake).

Wellman has been a highly regarded writer for the stage for a couple of decades now, but as far as I know the Subversive Theatre's is probably the first local production of one of his plays. And it's a doozy, staged under the stars on a set that consists of a vintage Mustang convertible, behind Quaker Bonnet on Allen St.:



There's no place I would rather have been on the hottest night of the year than watching this show, revelling in Wellman's often-hilarious flights of fancy as delivered by a wonderful ensemble cast.



On the night I went, director (and festival poobah) Kurt Schneiderman introduced the play by mentioning its origins in the heyday of the NEA culture wars at the start of the 1990s, but don't get the wrong idea: this is by no means a period piece. You don't really need to know anything about its historical context to appreciate the message; in fact, in these days of rampant religious fundamentalism on multiple fronts, I'd say it feels more relevant than ever.

(An added bonus, if you want to call it that, to Tuesday night's performance came from a particularly noisy voice during the masterful final scene that I first assumed belonged to a cast member--particularly since the voice was spewing the same wild and nonsensical profanity as the characters in the show. Turns out this interruption was not in the script, but the cast incorporated it so briliantly that my head started to spin. Infringement, like those furballs, is a force beyond anyone's control, it appears.)

Three more chances to catch this one as of now; click here for details.