It's difficult to find exactly the right description of the Ottawa Little Theatre's latest production, Joe DiPietro's Over the River and Through the Woods, which opened Monday night.
True, it's a bittersweet and ultimately heartwarming examination of the conflict between familial oblication and the need to spread one's own wings, but then that makes it sound a little too overbearing and saccharine, kind of like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
The play is also an extremely funny indictment of the double-wide generation gap between a young man and his grandparents, but that smacks a little too close to sitcom territory.
A love story? Well, sort of, or at least you get the impression that it's going to turn out that way. A farce? That, too, at times.
In short, Over the River is some of all of these, an emotional potpourri that cleverly underscores one man's attempts to discover the path that his life must take.
Nick Cristano is a 29-year-old New York marketing executive on the rise. With his parents' move to Florida, followed by his sister's departure to San Diego, however, he remains the last close link to his four Hoboken, New Jersey, granparents, with whom he religiously, if at times dutifully, shares dinner every Sunday evening.
The Italian-American grandparents - Frank, Aida, Nunzio and Emma - are wonderful characters; at times curmudgeonly, at others downright aggravating and frustrating, but always well-meaning. Frank shouldn't be driving anymore. Aida seems to believe that there's nothing that some provolone won't fix. The house is always about 110 degrees, and the air-conditioning is never turned on before July 4. None of them understand VCRs, answering machines or Trivial Pursuit.
The one thing they share a firm understanding of, though, is tengo familia, the belief that nothing is as important as family, and that being a man means taking care of family.
But ensuing generations of providing "a better life" has left Nick little in common with his grandparents, and his announcement of a job promotion that will take him to Seattle leaves them baffled: how could he move from his family, they wonder. Everything he could want is already here.
And so the four conspire to change Nick's mind, primarily by inviting Caitlin, the daughter of one of Emma's canasta partners, over for one of the weekly dinners.
Mayhem, as they say, ensues. The matchmaking dinner scene that follows is a brilliant and hilarious mix of overly blunt earnestness, as wehn, for example, one of the grandparents' inquiry as to how long Caitlin has been single is interrupted by another's suggestion that "maybe if you did something with your hair..."
Directed by Sharon Magee-Smith, the OLT's production benefits from a strong, even cast.
Ben Farella and Gail Fenderson, as Nick and Caitlin, both merit mention for their fine performances, especially Farella, who convincingly conveys the angst of leaving ones you love. But it is the grandparents, played by Gary Smith, Sheila Shileds, Moe Romano and Aline Van Dine, that carry the day. Each brings warmth and whimsy, cut with an all-too familiar astringent, to the table, leaving just enough breathing room amidst the hilarity for them, and Nick, to learn something about tengo familia.