by Carolyn Hayes Harmer

Posted: Jan. 11, 2015 at 6:13 p.m.

Theater satisfies different tastes and appetites in the same way that food does. Just as there will always be daring, trendy restaurants combining exotic flavors in new ways, hoping to stay on the foodie-hipster cutting edge, our palates maintain a similar level of enthusiasm for simple, classic fare done exquisitely well.

As theatrical dishes go, “Things My Mother Taught Me” by Katherine DiSavino is as safe as they come: small scope, mostly external conflict, big physical comedy, and extra punchy laugh lines. Yet even so, the Michigan premiere production at Meadow Brook Theatre is anything but bland. Indeed, director Travis W. Walter and company find every opportunity to wring new comic zest out of an old chestnut: Parents just don’t understand.

For example, take the play’s move-in-ready Chicago apartment setting. Given a scripted vacant void, designer Brian Kessler goes the extra mile to show the bones of a fully realized real estate listing: “historic building” (hidden radiator), “recently renovated” (cookie-cutter floor plan repeated in the apartment glimpsed above), “modern kitchen” (accent lighting and backsplash straight out of a TV remodeling show).

This is the new abode of millennials Olivia (Dani Cochrane) and Gabriel (Lucas Wells), who are almost finished relocating from New York City – that is, just as soon as they can un-wedge the armchair from the front doorway and bring in the rest of their worldly possessions from the moving van. But this one obstacle spins off into many, beginning with the surprise arrival of Gabe’s, and then Liv’s, respective parents. (And their eagerness to “help.” And their suffocating advice. And their take-charge hijacking of the proceedings.) Add to that a few secrets shared and spilled, and a couple of personal disasters, and the whole zany plot takes on the feel of a long sitcom: larger than life, and sure to resolve happily in the nick of time.

To their credit, Walter and cast pump up these low stakes with an emphasis on chemistry and reactions, which here are irreproachable. Cochrane and Wells have coupledom down to a T, melding the easy rapport of a longtime pair with the growing pains of a big relationship step and the fresh challenges of joint decision making.

Moreover, these two crazy kids are wholeheartedly supported – not only as characters, but as actors – by the parental ensemble around them, all playing to the height of their skill and intelligence. Karen Sheridan kills with well-meaning kindness as she puts the “mother” in “smother,” bookended by the dually wise and incorrigible depths of Wayne David Parker. On the more imperious and detached parenting front, Debbie Williams’s mantle of tone-deaf disconnect proves the best vessel for Liz Goodall’s type-making costume design. And Phil Powers throws off his early tech-giddy shtick to deliver what might rank as an epic poem of “can’t hold his liquor.” Even the character of the Polish building super, whose defining trait is essentially “Foreign,” is uplifted in the capable hands of Mark Rademacher. Together, the cast navigates expert buildups and hammy releases, but also earns its syrupy sweet character payoffs, even pulling off a gratuitous and tonally mismatched why-the-heck-not? coda.

A meal can be as pedestrian and predictable as it likes; so long as it’s delicious and filling, that’s what diners will talk about. And so it is with “Things My Mother Taught Me,” whose standard sitcom fare gains gourmet flair by its sprightly jesting, well-played excesses, and rampant enthusiasm that emboldens the viewer to dig in and just laugh along.

SHOW DETAILS: ‘Things My Mother Taught Me’
Meadow Brook Theatre
2200 N. Squirrel Road, Rochester, MI 48309
Running Jan. 7 – Feb. 1, 2015
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes (including 15-minute intermission)
$26 to $41
248-377-3300 or www.ticketmaster.com.