Is Nothing Sacred? (Nope)

Viewers will probably never see Mac Wellman’s darkly comic, hard-to-summarize plays on TV’s “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” But his work has already bowed on a far more unlikely venue: the Christian talk show “The 700 Club.”

In 1990, Wellman wrote a blistering letter to family-values guru Donald Wildmon. The playwright was upset by attacks from Wildmon and others on the National Endowment for the Arts, which had supported Wellman’s work. So he sent Wildmon a copy of his latest play, “Sincerity Forever,” along with a note urging him to “keep those hell fires burning bright.” The letter was eventually broadcast, Wellman says, by another NEA foe, Pat Robertson, on his “700 Club.”

“I think [those leaders on the religious right] are undemocratic bigots and their idea of religion is simply organized bigotry,” Wellman said recently.

As his reaction to the NEA flap proved, Wellman enjoys dining on sacred cows. Though low-key and easygoing in a telephone interview, the 51-year-old New York poet and playwright nevertheless relishes the opportunity to drop-kick pieties, whether religious, political or artistic.

To critics who complain that his dense, often nonsensical plays are inscrutable, Wellman offers no apologies. “It’s not that I’m trying to make my stuff willfully obscure,” he explained. “The world most of the time seems a very strange and complicated place to me, and I want to make plays that in some sense are as complicated and strange as the world we live in.”

‘Complicated and strange” is an apt description of his latest piece, “The Lesser Magoo,” which opens Thursday in a production by the troupe Bottom’s Dream at the Ivy Substation in Culver City. It’s the last in a four-play cycle called “Crowtet,” which encompasses the previous efforts “A Murder of Crows,” “The Hyacinth Macaw” and “Second Hand Smoke.”

The cycle is inspired by the biblical legend of Susannah, which is, in Wellman’s words, “a story about youthful innocence besmirched or somehow attacked but ultimately vindicated.”

But viewers should not expect a straightforward, easily digestible story. “The Lesser Magoo” caroms wildly, its wicked puns and non sequiturs sketching a strange bit of business involving a character named Mr. Candle, an expert on the arcane subject of Crowe’s Dark Space.

“It’s a kind of very odd linguistic and imaginative journey that goes basically wherever the characters want it to go,” Wellman said, adding that the title refers to the “totally maniacal” 1932 Ben Hecht-Gene Fowler stage comedy “The Great Magoo.”

Wellman classifies himself, like fellow playwrights Suzan Lori-Parks and Erik Ehn, as part of a group of writers called “language poets.”

“I don’t know if I can call it a movement, strictly speaking, but I think that all of us are interested in heightened language, the effect of heightened language in the theater . . . rather than a kind of theater that is based on conventional notions of what drama, tragedy and comedy are,” he said.

Dallas-based director Katherine Owens, who is directing the Ivy Substation premiere of “The Lesser Magoo,” sees Wellman as a pivotal talent who has led a trend toward poetic drama.

“He’s an important beacon in American poetry,” she said during a rehearsal break. “We haven’t had a big movement in American poetry since the Beat poets [in the ‘50s].” Wellman has actively encouraged an entire generation of younger poets to try dramatic writing, she added.

The playwright grew up in Cleveland, a city that has often kindled his imagination in the years since he left. “At that time, it was a kind of dying mill town, and lots of people were being pushed out, migrating to the Sun Belt,” Wellman said. “It was a harsh, urban environment, very cold in the winter, hot in the summer, grotesquely polluted. All [these] images of fire and snow [and] great, ugly, urban landscapes.”

He thought he wanted to be in the foreign service and attended a diplomatic school affiliated with American University in Washington. But while studying abroad in 1965, he happened to have a chance meeting on a Dutch freeway with a theater director named Annamarie Prins.

“I was hitchhiking in [an illegal] spot,” he recalled, “and she yelled at me in perfect English, ‘You can’t hitchhike there.’ ”

They became friends, and it was Prins who encouraged Wellman to start writing plays.

After graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, Wellman taught college composition to pay the rent; in his spare time, he devoured books on literature, philosophy and history and wrote poetry. (One of his best-known collections is “A Shelf in Woops’ Clothing,” published by Sun and Moon Press in Los Angeles.) But writing for the stage proved a slow and often agonizing struggle.

“I certainly wasn’t any kind of prodigy,” he admitted. “I think it took me until I was about 30 before I could write anything that anybody would understand and like.”

But recognition has finally come. Such controversial plays as “Terminal Hip” and “7 Blowjobs” have been produced at a number of small regional stages across the United States, including Primary Stages in New York, the Sledgehammer in San Diego and Owens’ Undermain Theater in Dallas. (Wellman lives in New York with his wife, a Dutch-born journalist.)

“These places have been very, very loyal to me, and I’m very grateful to them because the kind of work I do is rarely, if ever, commercial, so the larger institutional theaters aren’t terribly interested,” he said. He also teaches at Yale, is a frequent grant recipient and, last year, served as playwright-in-residence at A.C.T. in San Francisco. His main concern at the moment, though, is time.

“I’m a little scared because playwrights don’t age well. They sort of burn out about five years earlier [than the age I am now],” he said and chuckled. But he’s not too worried yet: “I actually think my plays are getting better,” he said.

*

“THE LESSER MAGOO,” Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 1. Price: $15. Phone: (310) 231-0446.