A question of authenticity in ‘Bakersfield Mist’

In an absorbing Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater production of this new comic drama under the direction of Jeff Zinn, the question of authenticity, in more than one sense of the word, is at issue.

As Willy Russell did with “Educating Rita,’’ Sachs throws together two characters from different worlds in “Bakersfield Mist’’ - one overeducated, the other street-smart - and lets the sparks fly.

Like Russell, Sachs has a weakness for overly glib repartee, a sentimental streak, and a tendency to italicize his message. But Sachs also has a Russell-like empathy for his characters and a knack for constructing verbal showdowns through which we can see that, for at least one of the two people onstage, the stakes of this encounter are life-or-death.

Maude Gutman, an unemployed bartender in a leopard-print blouse who is played by Paula Langton, lives in a trailer decorated with bric-a-brac she has bought at thrift stores. On the wall of her trailer hangs a kitschy painting of two clowns, but that’s not the painting the renowned and haughty Lionel Percy (played by Ken Cheeseman) has grandly deigned to inspect.

Lionel has arrived at Maude’s trailer (by limousine, no less) to determine whether or not her latest thrift-store purchase, a work of abstract expressionism that she bought for a paltry $3, is actually an undiscovered Pollock worth many millions of dollars.

After reeling off his credentials, including a lengthy stint as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lionel tells Maude that he is an expert at detecting forgeries. Indeed, he is a “fake-buster’’ with absolute faith in the infallibility of the Gladwellian “blink,’’ his instant, intuitive knowledge of whether a painting is genuine or not.