Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, and Noah Galvin Photo by Ahron R. Foster

The playwright, who self-identifies as a "queer, sober, Jewish clown from Colorado" as well as (ahem) "a recent graduate of The Juilliard School," has conjured up his seeming doppelgänger in the depiction of Josh (a terrific Noah Galvin, buttressed by a perfect ensemble of top-notch castmates). The operant word here is "sober," an adjective that becomes a day-to-day effortful verb in the life of our alcoholic protagonist.

We first meet, or, rather, encounter Josh as we enter the theater and spot him splayed on the floor of the stage, a suitcase lying at his head. Is he asleep, unconscious, or, God forbid, dead? Well, apparently not the latter, because he suddenly comes to, looks around, and takes in the beautiful sunrise over the banks of the Cherry Creek Reservoir in suburban Denver, where he had passed out sometime during the night. It is, he notes, "the perfect way to wake up from a bender." At least until a park ranger approaches and begins questioning him.

Engaging in what is clearly a well-practiced charm offensive, Josh manages to sidestep the brush with the law. It does, however, take a while for him to figure out that he is back home in Denver, having apparently flown in from New York while on medical leave from NYU's acting program. Though still only in his 20s, Josh is a long-time alcoholic who has failed repeatedly at both self-directed and professional therapeutic efforts at finding a path to sobriety. He's smart enough to recognize "you can't fix broken thinking with broken thinking," but he is at sea as to what to do about it. His vague plan is to try once more while nesting with his wary mother (Heidi Armbruster) and seeking solace from his aging grandparents. As the poet Robert Frost famously wrote: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

The bulk of the plot involves Josh and those grandparents: his beloved Nana (Mary Beth Peil) and Grandpa Hank (Peter Maloney), both of whom are dyed-in-the-wool conservative Christians, and his no-nonsense Jewish Grandma Beverly (Caroline Aaron) and wry Grandpa Shrimpy (Chip Zien), who has decided at the age of 83 to have a second bar mitzvah. While Josh turns to his elders for comfort and love, he also comes up with a half-baked scheme to assist them with their own age-related memory loss issues, convincing himself that by helping them, he will also shore up his own alcohol-induced mental lapses through healthy habits of diet and exercise.

Photo 2 Caption: Caroline Aaron, and Noah Galvin Photo by Ahron R. Foster

But setting aside these glitches, Jake Brasch has a real gift for creating characters and dialogue that touch both the funny bone and the heart, bringing to mind writers like Christopher Durang, Paula Vogel, and Joshua Harmon. And that is mighty fine company, indeed. Director Shelley Butler also does an excellent job of maintaining the balance between the comic and dramatic elements, and of moving things between realism and offbeat theatrical elements, corresponding with fluctuations in Josh's mental state.

Of the rest of the cast, let's give a special shout out here to Caroline Aaron's Grandma Beverly, somewhat echoing the character of Shirley she so deliciously portrayed in the Amazon Prime comedy "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." Here she is a brassy, tough, smart purveyor of tough love and big heartedness, a Bubbe we should all be so lucky to have on our team. But still, in the end, it is clear that Josh, who plans to return to NYU and presumably throw himself into the high-risk pursuit of an acting career, will have to learn to leave the nest and fly, scarily and soberly, on his own.