Sincerity Forever

Book excerpt: Two profane aliens have landed in the Southern town of Hillsbottom. Is God watching? Does he care? Is God a He? Mac Wellman addresses these and other questions in this Obie Award-winning play that skewers the social malignancy of ignorance. In 2003, The Village Voice gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Mac Wellman: "... [he] has long situated himself on the frontier of new forms. He's not only an experimental dramatist of the first rank, but also an eloquent champion of the avant-garde ... Like Beckett's characters, the figures in his work inhabit both a purely theatrical world and a space that will not let you forget the social realities compounding the existential mystery." "In SINCERITY FOREVER, Mac Wellman's savage comedy about everyday lunacies in America, two adolescent girls in a dirt-poor Southern town calmly accept the order of the universe. God must have a plan, says one, or why else would He keep both of them 'ignorant forever in absolute sincerity.' Like everyone else in Hillsbottom, the two are wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes. They are blissful in their brainlessness, confessing they cannot tell good art from bad art and do not know why junk bonds are junky. The conversation dwells on important matters like boyfriends rather than on child abuse or the plutonium-poisoned water that is killing their community. Mr Wellman's view of contemporary society is dire but not doleful. In his headlong search for social and political commentary, he never neglects his comical instincts, starting with the fact that the play is dedicated to Jesse Helms ... The framework of the play is fantasy. A 'mystic furball' has infected Hillsbottom. What, you may ask, are furballs? They are foul-mouthed aliens that look like partly plucked chickens. The two who have landed (or have emerged from Hell) are played in full comic plumage ... Because of the play's graphic language and its approach to piety, some theatergoers may find SINCERITY FOREVER offensive, a fact that should please the playwright. Mr Wellman does not play anything safe as he does his danse macabre far out on the cutting edge." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times