Rarely does a play come with a food allergy warning.

But David French’s 1972 Canadian hit Leaving Home, in a must-see Halifax production of stunning acting and realism, requires the Mercer family to sit down for a tense dinner of seafood casserole and green beans.

Director Jake Planinc dreamed of mounting the two-hour, semi-autobiographical story when his Mount Allison drama teacher recommended this fan of Chekhov and Ibsen read a meaty Canadian play. “I was immediately taken by it. That really changed the course of my life,” he says.

As a young man, Planinc identified with the sons’ efforts to get out of the family home; today he’s a father and sympathizes with the parents.

It’s taken him several years since co-founding Matchstick Theatre with Alex Mills and Chelsea Dickie in 2017 to produce Leaving Home, last seen in Nova Scotia 50 years ago at Neptune Theatre. He waited to gather the confidence, the money and the team he wanted, in particular stalwart, seasoned actors Shelley Thompson and Hugh Thompson.

It’s an acting match made in heaven in fierce and fiery performances by both Thompsons who are unrelated except in talent. Please travel through this story of family love and conflict to get to the final moment between Mary and Jacob. Rarely does a play end so touchingly and these actors give it a pitch perfect poignancy.

Leaving Home, a drama salted with humour and the first in French’s series about the Mercer Newfoundland immigrant family in Toronto, is set on the night before a shot-gun wedding between youngest son Billy and his girlfriend, Kathy Jackson, the daughter of a Newfoundland family friend. Older son Ben has just graduated from high school and is on his way to university.

The audience is virtually on top of this family, peering in at them from seats placed around the rectangle of the stage with its hyper-realist 1950s kitchen and dining and living areas. I sat by the stove and could smell the casserole in the oven which is pretty exciting.

Hugh Thompson creates a beautiful, spot-on tragic figure incarnating the garrulous, drunken, kind, loving and often very funny Jacob with all his frustrations and over-the-top temper. As Mary says, he just doesn’t know when to stop and it is painful to watch Jacob deconstruct what he loves and what is essential to him.

From the very beginning Shelley Thompson in a beautiful blue, swirly ’50s party dress is totally convincing as Mary Mercer, bustling around the kitchen pouring peaches into tiny dishes, cutting up bread for the table, talking away to her sons, getting hot and frustrated, waiting for her husband.

Together she and Hugh Thompson create a realistic portrait of a long marriage that began with deep love and – while it still holds a lot of love and fond memories – has been eroded by conflict. Over the years Mary has sided with her two boys and has kept their secrets from Jacob so he feels like an outsider.

On this night the family deals with the universal themes of frustrated love and the moment in every family’s life when the kids need to forge their own identities and go and the parents must let them go and stifle their own fears and emotions – unless they are Jacob!

A lot of the humour lies in Sharleen Kalayil’s wonderful incarnation of Minnie, also an ex-Newfoundlander, the mother of the bride-to-be and a very colourful, flirtatious, incredibly direct and sometimes nasty character who breezes into the modest Mercer home in a fur coat with her embalmer boyfriend Harold who never speaks. Sebastien Labelle somehow gives a lot of expression to an expressionless guy in this hilarious interpretation of Harold.

Planinc also has a fine trio of younger actors – Lou Campbell as Ben, a passive character pushed to the limit by his father; Sam Vigneault as the confused and scared Billy and Abby Weisbrot as the equally fraught though more practical bride-to-be.

Planinc, who meets the directorial challenge of sightlines as well as finding the rhythms in the play, decided to thoroughly anchor Leaving Home in the 1950s in terms of design and costuming and let the audience figure out the parallels to families today – and the parallels are obvious.

Planinc has also assembled a crackerjack design team with Wesley Babcock’s imaginative and elegant set, designed to mimic the act of looking through open curtains into a lit home; Kaelen MacDonald’s colourful period costumes with a great flashy, red dress for Kalayil’s character and soft, poetic and elegant lighting by Alison Crosby with sound design by Jordan Palmer.

Nikki Lipman, who acted in David French plays at Neptune Theatre and remembers Flo Patterson as Mary Mercer, was at the preview performance (she’s in town to perform in Neptune’s The Full Monty). As we spoke she said the set reminded her of magic realism and an Alex Colville painting, whereas the French plays she worked on had sets full of knickknacks. This set is sparer; nothing is extraneous and yet it seems so real and true to its time.

This revitalization of a Canadian classic is proving popular; Matchstick has been able to expand its seating for the run to March 31. The venue, at 2164 Barrington St., is best accessed by parking above Barrington on Brunswick or Nora Bernard Streets and walking down Nora Bernard and turning right to find a wooden building with red doors and vaulted ceilings.

Tickets are $30 at matchsticktheatre.ca.

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