But that is also the revelation. When they discover tenderness, you can go with them. When they scream at each other, you can shrink down for a few minutes. The story is simple, the script is complex and the dialog is efficient.

Three sisters in their 20s in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, haven't been close lately, but for the purpose of this story they're on stage almost all the time. As you think Lenny(Jill Underwood) is an old maid in the making, and Meg(Stef Dickens) is an out of place failed singer, and Babe(Stela Burdt) is naively honest, you're driven to like them by the witchest of them all-cousin Chick(Adrienne Sweeney). Her job is to be more dislikeable than anybody and she succeeds. Keep in mind she is a cousin and they share a grandpa about whom they talk a lot.

Babe is the youngest and early married the successful lawyer in town but things haven't gone well lately. "He started hating me because I couldn't laugh at his jokes." At some point she gets the burglar gun and points it at her head but decided she wanted to live and pointed at her husband Zachariah Botrelle(he's never on stage). "I aimed at his heart but my hand was shaking so much I hit him in the stomach."

The sisters can't hire the best lawyer in town because that's Botrelle, so they get this new guy Barnette(Jerome Yorke). It's Yorke's first Commonweal appearance and a great fit. Looking appropriately like a lawyer, but new and hesitant and a little unsure he reveals a hard inner drive, "I have a personal vendetta to settle with Zachariah. I want not only to keep him from being reelected to the senate but also to decimate him personally."

The sixth cast member is Eric Graves as Doc whom Meg left during hurricane Camille and only now has a reunion.

That's how we date this Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Beth Henley. It is five years after Camille in 1969, a category five storm stronger than Katrina. That makes the set another story as the kitchen cabinets and telephone fit the 70s. The refrigerator the 50s. The freestanding cupboard the 40s and the cookstove the 30s. It's clever and it works. The lighting had modest work to do but it is the cleanest in many shows. The costumes work well for the personalities of the sisters but Lenny's 1948 clodhopper shoes might be overdoing it. Chick, as you would expect, is despicably well dressed. The gentle southern dialog is easily given and easily heard without flinging word rocks as Burl Ives in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

David Gardiner is making a return appearance to direct this show and it is well-paced and acceptably extreme as it often goes from laughing to crying to stuck on the fence. We can figure out what they should do, but it takes them longer to figure out want they can do. That's why you go along for the ride and it's a full night of entertainment.

Call the box office for times as it plays in repertory with "Ghosts." If you don't buy a season ticket, remember to ask for the Houston-Fillmore County discount.