The Sanders family is late. They been on hiatus from the gospel music circuit on account of Uncle Stanley being in the penitentiary, but now he's out and they're back on the road, asinging and a-witnessing all over Carolina. They were due at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church a half hour ago, but they pulled over to look at all the cucumbers growing in the fields around the pickle plant, and when everybody moved to the same side of the bus, it rolled into the ditch. Flopped right over like a dizzy mule. Oldest sister June, she clambered out and run ahead to tell Pastor Oglethorpe that the others was a-coming just as soon as they could get the bus back on its wheels. June's the one who can't sing. Her job is to help the deaf folks understand the hymns by moving her hands and her arms in ways that show the meaning of the words. She calls it signing. Feller might feel sorry for her if he didn't know why she was wiggling that way.

That's a summary, in mountain English, of the dramatic arc of Wayside Theater's current production, "Smoke on the Mountain." In the uninflected English of conventional journalism, the summary would be shorter: nothing really happens.

Why, then, does everybody love it?

Perhaps because the members of the Sanders family are Appalachian stereotypes who remind some folks around here of the old days. The play hearkens back to 1938, when right and wrong may have been easier to distinguish, on the large scale if not on the small one. And in an era like ours, when new discoveries about the human brain and the nature of the universe are constantly changing our ideas about who we are and where we came from, nostalgia for the simple past is a powerful tool, which would explain why mountain people loved that play, even though nothing happens.

But I was born in Minnesota. Different food, different churches, different vowel sounds.

Why did I love it?

I suppose it's possible to feel nostalgia for the idealized versions of a past life that doesn't resemble your own, and it's true that my wife was born and raised in Mars Hill, North Carolina, a town so picturesquely and archetypically Appalachian that even its name suggests another world from mine. But I don't like picturesque nostalgia in theater because its intention is dishonest: the only way to reconcile the world we live in with the lure of picturesque nostalgia is to use a paradigm that absolves you from paying attention.

Perhaps I liked the music, twenty-six old gospel hymns in five-part harmony, with fiddle, banjo, mandolin, bass, and guitar. The a capella numbers sounded good, but I've heard those hymns performed by Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, and Mother Maybelle Carter. I've heard Emmy Lou Harris sing "Angel Band" in a voice so fraught with longing that it makes you want to give your soul to Jesus, just so she'll feel better. If you want music, go hear Emmy Lou.

Tens of thousands of New Yorkers, most of them not given to use the Bible as a roadmap for everything from courtship to the subway system, kept the play onstage at the Lamb Theater for 475 consecutive nights when it premiered in 1990, far longer than anyone involved in the play thought it would run. A theater in Branson, Missouri has been running the show for thirteen years. Authors Connie Ray and Alan Bailey have written two sequels. It's the most successful franchise in musical theater.

Why?

Perhaps because we recognize our mamas and our aunties on that stage, and we cherish them for reducing the world they raised us in to simple terms; but we also recognize that we can't stay in the world they simplified: they left too much out.

The actors who play Stanley and Vera in Wayside's production are especially skillful at suggesting that the world of hymns and aunties isn't purely sunshine. Jody Lee plays Stanley with a sullen reserve that makes you wonder what happened to him. He may be glad he's out of the big house, but he isn't pleased to be back on the gospel circuit with his brother Burl. The story he tells about a brutal man he knew in prison suggests that the witnessing tradition may be a way of reconciling what doesn't make sense, like Stanley's mysterious darkness, with the vision that explains the world in Bible verses.

Pam Pendleton plays Vera, the family matriarch, with an edge of contempt for the simplicity of that vision, because it's supposed to contain her. She is the smartest person on the stage, and the strongest, but her culture makes her pretend that she isn't. Her mind is so much bigger than the Reverend Oglethorpe's that she can quote the Bible to undermine whatever he says, and when he tries to counterquote, she names the chapter and verse before he finishes speaking. When the reverend quotes Jesus as saying, "For we have piped unto you and ye have not danced," to prove that dancing's sinful, Vera quietly crumbles the rock of his world. She knows that Jesus is condemning the members of his generation for not dancing in that context, but she doesn't force the Reverend to admit his blunder; she just smiles and crosses her arms in a moment of victory he doesn't fully understand.

That pose and that moment epitomize the power of this play: it indulges our nostalgia for the simple world of certainties, even as it shows us why we have to leave that world behind.

"Just a few more lonely days and then," the hymn assures us, "I'll fly away!"

Maybe so: who knows? But for the moment we're caught in transition--American culture is caught in transition--from what we were to what we're going to be. This play lets us relish parts of our heritage that we've outgrown, inexorably, whether we wanted to or not. And we love it for that.

"Smoke on the Mountain" continues at The Wayside Theater until March 10.