Stage:

...Their sincerity speeches, full of marish adversary to make his grand show look even better than American optimism, are invaded and subverted by the presit really is...

...Not a bad and chaos the better for having been there...

...called "a Iliad and the Bible, and we still come away from their gore four-letter version of the Sermon on the Mount...

...duction...

...he called the play "yet another NEA outhibits the ability to use storytelling as a tool for living, that rage...

...One fatuous scene between a boy and When Sincerity Forever first appeared at the Berkshire girl is redone word-for-word with two boys and takes on a Theatre Festival in 1990, it was cited by the American Theatre totally different tone...

...FRANK MCCONNELL ence of "Two Mystic Furballs of the Tribe of Abadddon and Belial," negation figures...

...Here he uses two styles: the brooff-Broadway listings and move quickly midic everyday language of the high schoolers, a mixture of before the productions fold their tents and quietly fade away...

...up two Obies and a citation from Mel Gussow in his Off- It is a rich and challenging Wellman brew...

...last long denunciatory speech by Jesus H. Christ, a speech And we read those two-literally-appalling books, the which Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif...

...Maybe-I'm not description, but the self-styled legislative moralist did not mean kidding here-there's some kind of recessive gene that in- it as a compliment...

...This Steven Bochco must be, at this moment, one of the happiest is a familiar Wellman theme, voiced in various imaginative guys in the world: not only because he's brought forth yet one conceits-a conviction of what, as Jesus H. Christ says, "a/sorry more splendid demonstration of how good TV can be, but be- place this world is, what with all the jive/ass bullslinging, cause he's summoned forth the ideal, thin-lipped and school- and endless justifying...

...He plays verbal Theatre Project, a new company which describes itself as tricks within the two styles...

...There is never any doubt that Wellman's plays are about A playgoer who wants to see what he is something in the most serious sense of aboutness, but the mark up to has to keep a sharp eye out for off- of his work is his language...

...Christ, who in this production is a STAGE 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...

...Despite the original critical realien environment...

...The play consists primarily of "dedicated to expanding the ambition and scope of non- two-character scenes, school chums or couples talking in a commercial contemporary theater...

...Wellman a playwrighting grant, asked him to remove NEA Wer weisst...

...That sounds like Wellman parked car...

...credit from the play which, with typical graciousness, he As a second-rank detective writer, I'm covered with envy at did, adding a note to the script saying that the play "was not the thing: it's the way a big city feels, and it's the way it feels made possible by the generous assistance of the NEA...

...The National Endowment for the Arts, which had given blocks the sense of metaphor...

...That volume, as the series regularly ingly normal self-righteous have been trying to insist that does with ATCA choices, printed a sample of the play, the this sort of thing is bad, perverting, soul-destructive for you...

...dating gossip and philosophic maundering, and the vital, viSincerity Forever was recently and briefly back in New York olent, obscene diatribes of the furballs, denunciatory catain a reasonably effective production by the Nevermore logues that become a kind of demented poetry...

...I don't to try to live in, and make a human life in, that surprisingly know what I was thinking...

...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 AfricanMac Wellman is one of the most elusive and American woman...

...Off-Broadway roundup in The Applause/Best Plays Theater GERALD WEALES Commonweal 8 October 1993: 21...

...The show itself is about as good as TV can get...

...Its first New York production, and even the furballs find themselves succumbing to protesby the late lamented BACA Downtown in Brooklyn, picked tations of sincerity...

...Obscene phrases from the furballs turn Critics Association (ATCA) as one of the outstanding new up in otherwise innocuous exchanges among the teen-agers, plays of the 1990-91 season...

...Her last long speech, which for all NEGATION FIGURES its vernacular eloquence begins to sound too overtly didacWELLMAN'S 'SINCERITY' tic, is saved by a last Wellman twist...

...At its center, it's a story about how terribly ception of the play and the whiff of scandal surrounding it, hard we try to love one another, and how terribly hard that is: it had pretty much disappeared until the Nevermore prowhich is, of course, what the big city is all about...

...Or maybe it will thrive acters, who are at once high-school students and members of because of that...

...And it will, I hope, survive the initial flak generated by The immediate point of Sincerity Forever is that the charWildmon and his brethren of the AFA...

...invade one another...

...As the play goes on, the conversations begin to territory...

...most impressive playwrights in America...

...their ignorance and their dangerous narrowmindedness...

...Surely, no TV premiere in recent years has got- the Invisible Nation (they wear KKK-style costumes that unten this much media attention: Wildmon's wildmen have made fortunately make them look like the Coneheads), readily prosure that everybody who could watch the first episode would claim their own sincerity and see it as a virtue which validates watch the first episode...