right with the world, but you wouldn't know it from appearances. The opening production of the Circle Repertory Company's season, "The Fiery Furnace "(Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater) brings instantly to mind the dramas of William Inge, who achieved enormous success during the Eisenhower years chronicling buried yearnings and spiritual death in Midwestern hamlets and, for a while, was considered in a league with Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. Inge's plays seem a little parochial to us nowadays, and so, in its early stretches, does Mr. Mason's. Then, in the second act, it jumps ahead to the 1960's, and, without abandoning its homely realism, delivers a jolt. A play that seems to have been marking time turns out not to have been marking time at all. It's been putting up a facade, locking conventions into place, nailing up escape hatches, so that when this beleaguered