ANN ARBOR, Mich.–Hardly anyone wants to end up in a nursing home. To be fair, there are “senior living options,” and there are “nursing homes.” Alice, in Happy Birthday Dear Alice, is being cajoled by her “adult” children to go into a senior-living facility so they can stop worrying whether she will fall or mentally decline in between annual birthday visits.

Not surprisingly, Alice is having none of it. She likes her simple home in Ireland where the play is set. And who can blame her for resisting the prods by her children who are as bossy and loathsome a pair of people as you will ever meet. They can’t really run their own lives very well. What business do they have trying to run Alice’s?

In this Mind The Gap production of the Bernard Farrell play, the widowed Alice, played wonderfully by Ellen Finch, is clearly not done being independent. Besides preferring her own home to places called “Sunny Acres” or “Chestnut Ridge,”  she has a sweet spot for her friend Jimmy, despite his wife still being alive. Jimmy is played by Adrian Diffey, who brings old-school comedic timing to this part, a tender-hearted local handyman who is hard of hearing and blamed by some for the death of Alice’s husband and ultimately his own wife.

Despite the seeming bummer of a story line, Farrell keeps it fairly light and moving briskly by exploiting the inherent humor in harpy and annoying kids trying to boss their lovely, wise and engaging mother around. Hannah Niece as daughter Barbara manages to strike a delicate balance between someone we can view as being genuinely caring about her Mom and greedy daughter who’d like to get her hands on Alice’s house and move back to Ireland with her lummox of a husband, Cormac (Stephan R. White).  Eric Niece as the son, Barry, plays the role to a high level of irritation, a middle-aged father who can’t seem to make an adult judgment. He has left his wife Valerie for British lassie Sandy (Erin Hildebrandt), who we come to view as perhaps the best of the lot of them. Even Alice likes her better than her own kids. Ms. Hildebrandt manages the slopes of Sandy’s arc in the story well–the poor sot who has cast her lot with the perfectly awful Barry and the indignant girlfriend who finally comes to her senses.

In a story like Happy Birthday Dear Alice, it is difficult to comprehend why on earth Barbara chose Cormac to begin with, or what Sandy was thinking when she decided to fall in with pathetic married Barry. But, alas, we all know people who make such mistakes.

Keeping with the Irish origin of the play, Diffey and director Fran Potasnik keep the story in the Emerald Isle. Diffey and Ms. Niece do the best jobs of delivering a decent Irish dialect.

Diffey and Potasnik are co-producers, and their set design works nicely in the intimate Yellow Barn space usually inhabited by Theatre Nova. They have created a believable modest kitchen and sitting room in a typical Irish flat, and gotten the dated nature of the appliances and kitchen products just right. Their attention to detail pays off. Alice doesn’t have much money, but she keeps her home clean and tidy and put together like a proper Irish lady. And everyone but her children seem to know that she is quite capable of remaining independent until she says otherwise.

Farrell’s play is a highly relevant slice of life whether you are watching this play in Ireland, Michigan, Italy or New Zealand. Whether it is time to take Mom’s keys away, or try and usher her into supervised living, these are debates and heartbreaks that take place the world over. His play and Mind The Gap’s production do an excellent job of finding the humor, irony, eye-rolls and sarcasm that usually infiltrates these situations.

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