WILLIAMSTON, MI–Looking back at one’s youth is a perilous activity. Having an adult’s knowledge and perspective on the world, you are sometimes left wondering how those things could have happened—why adults behaved the way they did, why you did the things you did and how everyone managed to survive, if in fact, they did.

Allison Gregory’s Wild Horses is a one-woman show in which the mother of teenagers looks back at the summer she was 13, a time in the 1970s when life was very different from what it is now. It’s playing at Williamston Theatre from now until Feb. 26 with Suzi Regan portraying dozens of characters as she shares the narrative of a teen girl coming to terms with the world.

The opening sentence lets you know that she isn’t afraid of exposing some of the ugly parts of youth and the 70s. She shares that the worst part of getting a belt whipping is the waiting. She’ll eventually go into more detail as you learn she is being whipped in part to keep her mother’s transgression secret. She’s also frank about sexual conduct that today would be called abuse.

Yet, Wild Horses is not a heavy drama. While it is emotional and intense, it is unapologetically a comedy, a coming-of-age story delivered with absolute frankness and heavy doses of hilarity. The unnamed narrator (she and the horses are the only ones without names) vividly recalls how she and her friends experimented with wild mixes of alcohol, took cars for rides without permission and plotted to free horses from a farm that didn’t properly care for them.

Regan does an amazing job of creating a wealth of characters, from her two best friends to their kinda-creepy brothers to her parents and sister to both her adult and younger self. Sometimes she is having a three- or four-way conversation with herself, quickly shifting between body language and vocalizations to let the audience know who is talking.  Her performance is powerful, embracing the full range of emotions on a wild journey.

While sometimes shows that have single actors taking on multiple roles feel affected, “Wild Horses” does not in no small part because it is always the narrator telling the story. She takes on the characters to tell her tale, but she is always telling it from her perspective.

Regan effectively pulls the audience into the story, eliciting their laughter and then delivering gut punches as she reveals the traumatic moments of that long-ago summer. Her character doesn’t pass judgment, but it is hard for the audience not to as they listen to her recollection of adultery, of adults having affairs with children and of her own first kiss, a situation where consent is given, but under duress.

Director Mary Job’s staging transforms Aaron Delnay’s set—the exterior of a Tastee Freeze—into areas that summon up the settings of the woman’s story—her parent’s bedroom, the roof of her house, her school, the front seat of a car and the hill-top fields of a farm. There is a rhythm to this play and Job conducts it carefully, allowing it to gallop through the comedy and then pause for those painful moments of memory and change.

Delnay finds a delicate balance between a set that is in the present and one that can summon up the memory of the 70s. It leaves plenty of room for the acrobatic moves of the main character.

Shannon T. Schweitzer’s lighting design provides the support Regan needs to take her story from day to night, from interiors to exteriors and from humor to heartbreak. Meanwhile, John Lepard’s sound design provides the track to the main character’s childhood in an unobtrusive way that helps to move the audience back in time.

Wild Horses is one of those memory plays that evokes laughter, but leaves you with sober thoughts once the final bow has been taken. It is a triumphant tale, one that explores what freedom means, what cost it comes at and how the events of our youth follow us through our life.