The well of Wellman is deep over at the Bat Theatre Company. The Off-Off Broadway company is bringing back its double bill of two of Mac Wellman's better known plays, Sincerity Forever and Cleveland, for a third time, from Oct. 11 to Nov. 19.
The two short plays were first presented by the Bat Theatre Company at Tribeca's Flea Theatre in a spring stand that concluded on May 26. But on Aug. 3, Sincerity returned for a new run through Sept. 10, and Cleveland came along with it. Laramie Dennis directs the first, Jim Simpson the second.
Sincerity will play alone on Saturdays at 10 PM. Both plays will be featured on Mondays and Thursdays at 7 PM.
The 1991 Sincerity Forever won an OBIE Award. The plot concerns several of the residents of Deep South burg Hillbottom, who all wear KKK like cloaks and hats and spend their time sitting in a pick-up talking about life, love, God and the mysterious Furballs that have infiltrating their community and altered their thinking.
Dennis first directed Cleveland at the Flea in 1999. Since then she has helmed The Learned Ladies at New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Freedomland at the Atlantic Theatre Studio, and various works as Soho Rep, the adobe theatre company and Theatre for the New City. She co chairs Soho Rep's playwrights-directors lab and is a resident director at the Flea. Cleveland actually takes place in a town you've heard of, the urban center of the title. There, a mother and daughter enact a very Wellmanesque take on kitchen sink realism (featuring a real kitchen sink which the mother symbolically attacks with a plunger to no avail). All goes well, even if the family isn't "fashionable," until the two women own up to being space aliens from rival moons.
Tickets are $15. The Bat is located at 41 White St. For more information, call (212) 226-2407.
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Two of the Bat's other summer attractions will also make fall appearances. Ajax by Alice Tuan, and directed by Simpson, will run Fridays at 10 PM, from Oct. 12 to Nov. 16. And No Mother to Guide Her, by Lillian Mortimer, again with direction by Simpson, will play Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays at 7 PM, Oct. 10 through Nov. 18.
—By Robert Simonson
