Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help at NC Stage Co.
As a friend and I exited NC Stage Co.’s Sunday matinee of the hilarious and touching Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, we marveled at the reconstructed 1973 living room and kitchen of the fictional O’Shea family.
The furniture and appliances, down to the tiniest item felt so authentic and lived-in that we wondered aloud where scenic designer Julie K. Ross and props designer Sylvia J. Pierce acquired everything — and if there’s some magical shared storage facility that a consortium of local theater companies use for their vintage stage needs.
Such attention to detail is necessary to bring Katie Forgette’s witty memory play to life, but under the thoughtful direction of Charlie Flynn-McIver, the writing and scenery meld with inspired performances and other technical elements to produce a show working in concert on each conceivable level.
Linda O’Shea (a plucky Dax Dupuy) serves as our guide to this blast from the past, one that she’s up front about possibly not remembering 100% accurately. Lighting from CJ Barnwell proves key to the play’s flashback (and -forward) components and a helpful guide for identifying when things are taking place. But the damn thing moves so well and elicits so much laughter that the mechanisms of why it’s all so successful fade as an extraordinarily well-written and -acted story unfolds.
While the series of “dominoes” that fall and threaten to forever change the course of the Irish Catholic family’s lives deserve to be experienced in real time and with as little foreknowledge as possible, it’s safe to say that the tiles start tipping when Linda is tasked by her mother Jo (Susan Stein) with enlightening her 13-year-old sister Becky (Kyra Hewitt) about menstruation — with a side of the birds and the bees, because might as well get it all out of the way in one go.
The blunt dialogue during this crucial exchange and in others that the O’Shea women share with Jo’s sister Terri (Heather Michele Lawler), patriarch Mike (Scott Treadway), and a few key community members are peppered with whip-smart, fast-paced dialogue that would make Howard Hawks proud. But as word of this sibling conversation extends beyond the house, the key players in this refreshingly female-centric show team up to try and protect their family’s reputation through imaginative and thoroughly funny means.
Along with Dupuy’s impressive tightrope performance as Linda does her best to get the facts right, Hewitt — a revelation as the White Witch in Flat Rock Playhouse’s 2019 adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — is a hoot as her classic-movie-obsessed, Bob-Dylan-questioning little sis, while Lawler inspires her nieces with fiery feminism and grounds them with the melancholy of her marital strife.
Elsewhere, Treadway gets a rare opportunity to let his curmudgeonly side shine (and clearly loves every second of it) as the family’s overworked breadwinner. But it’s Stein who holds it all together as the crew’s tough but loving matriarch, whose improbable number of spinning plates includes caring for her invalid mother-in-law, brought to life via knocks and shouts (convincingly pre-recorded by Lawler) from upstairs that add an extra (mostly humorous) layer of tension to the proceedings.
And while Victoria Depew’s costumes are the butt of jokes early and often, they’re key to those jokes landing and also work their magic through some unexpected routes. The wonky nature of memories 50 years on results in certain stronger personalities from Linda’s past inhabiting roles that they most certainly weren’t actually a part of — but man, does it make for great theater.
That all but Treadway are making their NC Stage debut is yet another piece of this brilliant puzzle to appreciate with jaw-dropping wonder. I doubt we’ll see a more entertaining production on local stages this year.
Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help runs through Sunday, Feb. 25, at NC Stage Co. For details and tickets, visit ncstage.org.
(Photo courtesy of NC Stage Co.)
