A reading of 'The Minutes' leads to hilarity — and horror — at Umbrella Arts Center

In a room in Big Cherry's town hall, more than a half dozen city council members meet during a storm. Stately oil paintings of powerful white men of yore decorate the walls, and brown desks with red binders and small U.S. flags form a semicircle in front of tall arched windows. Bare trees peek through the glass. As the council members trickle in, lightning strikes intermittently, causing the lights to go out.

Collegial in spirit, the members go over the day's business, tick through the agenda and remind one another of proper procedure at every turn with the perfectly smug and aptly named Mayor Superba (Steven Barkhimer) presiding. Still, even with the long list of items to cover, Big Cherry's meeting is much more fun than the city council meeting I attended years ago on assignment for my college newspaper. But soon, the rote gathering bares its sharp teeth as the town's history comes up for discussion in this horror-tinged comedy "The Minutes" at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord through March 24.

There's an excellent Umbrella Stage Company ensemble here, led by Ryan MacPherson's Mr. Peel, who is newish to the town and missed last week's meeting due to his mom's funeral. He wants to know why the minutes from last week aren't available to see and wonders where Mr. Carp (Elliot Norton Prize winner Jeremiah Kissel) is. No one's answering his questions. The members seem annoyed that Mr. Peel wants to be filled in for a meeting he missed. In the meantime, the group talks of the football team — the Savages ( a nasty taste of what's to come) — and Damon Singletary's Mr. Blake ("A Raisin in the Sun") wants the council to consider a Lincoln Smackdown (yes, that Lincoln) attraction for the failing town festival. An accessible fountain is ripped to shreds, but its attached monument featuring a hero of town lore is propped up, and there's a bunch of stolen bikes that could be donated to low-income families.

Elliot Norton Prize-winning director Scott Edmiston allows the cast in this apologue — with the gifted Richard Snee as the longest serving council member Mr. Oldfield, the overly medicated Julie Marie Perkins as Ms. Matz and Jason Myatt as the jerky, matter-of-fact Mr. Assalone —to work through the tedious business at hand at an even pace. But the hilarity of the dialogue gets punctuated throughout with these insidious pangs. June Kfoury's Ms. Innes gets the audience laughing even though she shares an awful tragedy with no justice. And a central sobering truth, when revealed, gets covered up again.

Letts, a playwright and actor who starred in Showtime's "Homeland," won the Pulitzer Prize for his “August: Osage County.” He uses this small town as a lens through which to view history. The play, which mentions the Native history of Big Cherry, is absent of Native characters onstage. It's a choice that mirrors history (Letts mentions that he consulted with Native voices in an interview). It begs viewers to grapple with the lengths people will go to keep creature comforts and uphold favorable narratives about how things have come to be. All the privileges one has end up costing something and the price is often, if not always, off-loaded on someone else. And those who pay or have paid for others to be in power typically don't get to own the narrative. For it's those who are in control, the keeper of the scrolls if you will, who will do anything to keep it that way.

"The Minutes" runs through March 24 at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord.