At the same time, its Off-Broadway roots are obvious in its whip-smart dialogue, intelligent characters and everyone's tendency to stop the action and speak directly to the audience now and then (a staple of "serious" theater).

Nick Cristano is a 27-year-old marketing executive whose only close relatives, geographically speaking, are his four grandparents. He has dinner with all of them every Sunday at the Hoboken, N.J., home of his maternal grandparents, Frank and Aida. Frank is an Italian immigrant who's been running into things with his car lately, and Aida is a typical Mom to whom everyone always looks hungry. Their house is perpetually hot (but not just "hot," Nick says; "August in Ethiopia hot"), because they won't run the air-conditioning.

The other grandparents are Nunzio and Emma -- "the loudest people I've ever met," Nick tells us. The four old-timers love to eat and talk, debating at which grocery store a certain pointless anecdote took place, or employing extremely circular deduction skills to remember who starred in "High Noon."

One Sunday, Nick announces he's been offered a promotion that would take him to Seattle. His grandparents are devastated, especially the Old-World Frank, for whom "tengo famiglia" ("keep the family," literally, but much more than that in Italian) is a rallying cry.

To keep Nick from moving, Emma invites Caitlin, the relative of a canasta partner, over to dinner one week, hoping she and Nick will fall in love. The encounter is a disaster (none of the grandparents can comprehend the concept of "vegetarianism"), and the plan backfires. Now, more than ever, Nick is convinced he needs to move far away from this insane, overly loving group of senior citizens. Then he has a panic attack and is forced to spend several days at the house, where he really gets to know his grandparents.

In a typical Hale Center play, the plan would work, Nick and Caitlin would fall in love, and he wouldn't move away. Also, the dinner scene would be the centerpiece of the show, full of farce and outrageousness and possibly with a man dressed as a woman.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" clings to realism without leaving behind sheer entertainment. The dialogue is eminently quotable. ("I want to see you married before I die," Emma tells Nick. He replies, "Let me know when you think you're going, and I'll see who I can dig up.")