Williamston’s ‘Incident at Our Lady …’ brings heartwarming nostalgia

If you, like me, grew up in a working-class Catholic home in the 1970s, you’ll find Katie Forgette’s memory play, “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” at Williamston Theatre to be a hilarious slice of nostalgia.  Even if you can’t relate to being terrorized by an autocratic parish priest (for me, it was the nuns), you’ll find yourself laughing your way through the meta moments and the absurdity of this family comedy.

When college-aged feminist Linda O’Shea is pressured by her mother to explain the “birds and the bees” to her 13-year-old sister, she responds with tart-tongued resentment.  Unfortunately for Linda, her sister tapes the conversation and shares it with her class for show and tell. The recording is overheard by the parish priest, who threatens to play the tape for Linda’s strict, Irish father.  As a multitude of secrets are revealed, the O’Shea family bands together to prove, like the Irish proverb, that “family is a haven of rest, a sanctuary of peace and, most of all, a harbor of love.”

In the first scene, Linda (Sophia Psiakis) tells the audience that this is a memory play, a term coined by Tennessee Williams in relation to his genre-defining work, “The Glass Menagerie.” As he described, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches.” Linda explains to the audience that in her memory of this life-shaping day, her father was such a larger-than-life character that she can’t help but cast him as several of the players in her retelling of events. 

Actor and Williamston Theater co-founder John Lepard hilariously leaps into the role of Linda’s father, Mike, as well as gossip-mongering church lady Betty and the odious Father Lovett. Wearing an angry, red face and a blue machinist suit, Lepard personifies the lower-middle-class “dad” of 1970s family comedies such as “All in the Family,” bombastic and tragically frustrated. Whether he’s returning from the hospital after a grave accident in the garage or donning a dowdy dress coat and heels, Lepard’s gift for physical comedy shines through.

However, it is Linda’s Aunt Terri (Sandra Birch) who competes with Linda for her piece of the narrative and wows the audience with her heartbreaking tale of marital heartbreak and regret. Like Brick Pollitt of Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with his “click” moment, Terri, not Theresa, shares the “snap” moment in which she finally decides that the life she has created with her husband is unbearable. Birch’s Terri is the middle-aged aunt, sister or best friend you always wished you had, a fiercely loyal, no-nonsense smart aleck. In a lighthearted and inviting way, Birch seems to be laughing her way through this production, and you can’t help but want to laugh, roll your eyes or shed a tear or two along with her.

As Williamston Theatre wraps up its 18th Season, the delightful “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” reminds us that friendship, faith and family are what hold us together.