By ERIC GRODEAUG. 1, 2014  Time away from the spotlight can make a writer contemplative, cooling youthful passions and leading to hard-earned, gnomic wisdom. Or it can drive the writer into a lather about pretty much everything that has happened in the interim.  Those familiar with Albert Innaurato — the brash plays that made him one of the most successful playwrights of the 1970s, and also the sporadic outbursts that have punctuated (and perhaps precipitated) his almost complete absence from the New York theater world for the last 25 years — might be able to guess which way he’s leaning these days.  “I was a wild writer, working out of this, this impulse,” said Mr. Innaurato (“Gemini,” “The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie”), who moved back to his hometown, Philadelphia, in 2004. “And I loved realizing as I wrote this play that I still had that impulse.”  “This play” is a new one-act, “Doubtless,” which opens on Sunday as part of 59E59’s annual Summer Shorts series. The series has featured world premieres by the likes of Neil LaBute and Tina Howe. But even the premiere of a William Inge play in 2009, more than 35 years after Inge’s death, is less surprising than the re-emergence of a man whose earlier fame — only three nonmusicals have had longer Broadway runs than “Gemini” — curdled to the point where, he said, “they hate me for whatever reason, and I’m not sure why.”  “Doubtless” is not exactly a bid by the 67-year-old Mr. Innaurato to ingratiate his way back into the inner circle, at least not on the face of it. This giddily blasphemous play features nun-on-nun makeout sessions; an orgy involving Antonin Scalia and an Italian salami; and allusions to a playwright “on his way to Philadelphia, obscurity and death.”  But the biggest gasp for those less pious audience members may stem from the play’s title. The two nuns find the time between pillow talk to eviscerate John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Doubt,” and its crusading Sister Aloysius.  “Look, I have nothing against John beyond envying his success,” Mr. Innaurato said. But, he said, the nuns who beat him (he put it more colorfully) until he “fled to a public high school would never, ever have turned in a priest.”  “They were just as brutal,” he said, “and that’s what I’m finding fault with in this play.”  His background differs from that of his director, Jack Hofsiss, a former altar boy and another long-absent force in New York theater. Mr. Hofsiss, who in 1979 became the youngest director ever to win a Tony Award, for “The Elephant Man,” was taught by Jesuits, which, he said, gave him a more nuanced, cerebral approach to Roman Catholicism.  “I was greatly influenced by this idea that we should think about our faith and question it and make our peace with it,” he recalled, “as opposed to having it shoved down our throats, as it was for Albert.”  Mr. Innaurato agreed, although in his own way: “You can’t be dumb and be a Jesuit.”  And, he said, he is hardly done with nuns: “Doubtless” is intended to be the third and final play in a planned evening that would also include depictions of the volunteer work that nuns did on behalf of AIDS patients in the 1980s, as well as a play set in a madhouse.  The three plays have existed for some time in the form of rough sketches. “It’s very hard to actually get everything on the page unless you think someone will get to see it,” Mr. Innaurato said, which is why they languished until John McCormack, the producing artistic director of Summer Shorts, emailed him out of the blue and asked if he had any unproduced one-acts to share. This spurred Mr. Innaurato to rework “Doubtless,” taking out what he called “the tap-dancing” and adding much of the political and religious commentary.  The result, crammed with esoteric theological ideas alongside the bawdy shenanigans, “is impossible to resist,” Mr. Hofsiss said. “It’s so wild, but there’s also a lot of very interesting biblical thought at play here. Albert is very, very serious in his way.”  It is this combination of craziness and cogency, so common to Mr. Innaurato’s work, that prompted Mr. McCormack to send that request. (Mr. Innaurato, who participates frequently and volubly in online opera forums, initially thought the email was a hoax and didn’t open it for a time; John McCormack was also the name of a popular Irish tenor from the early 20th century.)  Mr. McCormack said he thought the one-act form could serve as a good way to reintroduce Mr. Innaurato to New York — and vice versa. “I hope ‘Doubtless’ is good, of course,” he added, “but beyond that, I hope it motivates people to say, ‘Hey, let’s call up Albert,’ or ‘Hey, let’s see if any of Albert’s older plays are worth reviving.’ ”  Despite any lingering bad blood over dismissive reviews or auditioners who would fling their scripts to the ground before saying a word of dialogue, Mr. Innaurato would be all too happy to pick up the phone. He was reminded of his passion for theater when Christopher Durang, his old Yale School of Drama classmate and collaborator, invited him to see “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” in 2012.  “Seeing that show and being at Lincoln Center Theater reminded me that this was just so much what I’m born to do, write plays,” he said. “And to be exiled from it was painful. I know it sounds silly to say that at my age, but it’s true.”  A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2014, on page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Playwright Long Gone From New York Theaters, a Small Step Back. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
The playwright Albert Innaurato, almost completely absent from the city’s stages for 25 years, has a one-act comedy in 59E59’s Summer Shorts series.