• Courtesy Of Andy Duback
• From left: Chip Phillips, Sarah Carleton, Jeffrey Todd Parrott, Bill Carmichael, Brenda Pitmon

An Italian American family, served up with all the food clichés you can eat, is portrayed with warmth and wit in Joe DiPietro's Over the River and Through the Woods. In a charming production at Saint Michael's Playhouse, viewers will find sharp humor and a chance to bask in nostalgia while watching four grandparents dote on a 29-year-old grandson who's gently trying to grow up.

The play is a brimming collection of golden ages. The grandparents are stout-hearted immigrants who measure their lives by how well they've taken care of their families, not by money or status. The grandson is a modern bachelor who's not sure when, how or where to start his own family, but he's certain that a career in marketing will get him somewhere.

The people aren't the only element of the play that suggest a halcyon past. Lost cultural artifacts, such as landline telephones, Sunday dinners and Trivial Pursuit, can make you wistful, too. Watching this light comedy, you may find yourself asking about the past: Were people just nicer then?

Over the River is relentlessly heartwarming, but it's funny enough to balance its sugary sentimentality. At Wednesday's performance, frequent laughter rippled through the nearly full house. DiPietro's superficial characters are corny, but they have the kind of cozy consistency that sitcom viewers treasure.

Nick has a full set of living grandparents all to himself because his parents and sister have resettled far from home. He makes the trek to Hoboken, N.J., each Sunday for a huge dinner with these two older, very loving couples and enjoys teasing and being teased.

Four doting grandparents can be overpowering. Still, it's a sweet arrangement that allows Nick's family to fuss over him while he reels in disappointment at their failure to see the benefits of the VCRs and telephone answering machines he sets up for them.

Aida measures everyone's well-being by how well fed they are, while Frank wants to keep driving despite a tendency to mix up forward and reverse. Nunzio is still playing the little jokes Nick enjoyed when he was a kid. Emma doesn't mince words: "I want to see you married before I'm dead."

Essentially, time has stopped. The rituals and personalities repeat, which leaves Nick stuck, too — an adult who hasn't grown up enough to create a family of his own.

Then Nick breaks the news that he's moving to Seattle for a job promotion. The grandparents go into action like they've seen the Bat Signal. They have to give Nick a reason to stay, and they actually come up with a pretty good idea. Will it work?

The outcome is much in doubt, but the play is mostly a chance to show what it means to care for someone. The grandparents model marital devotion leavened with wisecracking, and the play's two generations convey the fine, funny line between love and exasperation. Such people only exist on TV, where they fulfill a need for an idealized world.

The play premiered in 1998 and had a two-year run off Broadway. Viewers may be slightly disoriented about time, because the setting is a house probably built in the 1930s with décor that hasn't been disturbed in years, and the grandparents cling to clothing fashions of the 1950s and 1960s. Tying it all together are the style of a sitcom and a present tense that's early 1980s.

DiPietro breaks the fourth wall with monologues that do some storytelling and signal that we need not take the rose-tinted events too seriously. Director Richard Warner fills the wide stage while neatly focusing attention on each individual exchange. He has shaped the cast into a cohesive joke-dispensing unit that earns laughs without losing the tenderness beneath them.

The professional actors know how to make the humor fly effortlessly and the sentiment settle gently. These veterans can keep wringing laughs from running jokes even when punch lines grow too predictable, and they occasionally transcend the script's stereotypes.

Bill Carmichael is a lovable patriarch as Frank, just crotchety enough to start arguments and adorable enough to end them sweetly. As Aida, Brenda Pitmon can stretch a comic beat like taffy. She serves a never-ending supply of food and somehow keeps that single joke fresh all night.

As Nunzio, Chip Phillips personifies a playful, good-hearted granddad. During a game of Trivial Pursuit, Nunzio's capricious free associations are wonderfully silly and hint at the subtle communication in a close family. Sarah Carleton, as Emma, gives the character dignity and directness. No matter how hokey the script, Carleton finds the rock-solid base for Emma's truisms.

Jeffrey Todd Parrott, as Nick, smiles cherubically as the grandparents smother him with affection. Nick's irritation with their meddling and pathetic grasp of the modern world always has some love in it. Lilly Tobin plays Caitlin, Nick's blind date, with a childlike sweetness a little at odds with the character's potential depth.

The Saint Michael's Playhouse stage is a wide wonder, and scenic designer Tim Case fills it with a well-realized living room and dining room, plus a nicely sketched porch and outdoor patio. The attention to set decoration gives the story a weight of family history.

Costume designer Brian Russman might veer too far in making the grandparents laughable fashion failures, but faithful touches such as Aida's housecoats are just right.

If Over the River is a little cheesy when you dissect it in the lab, it's quite appealing to imagine yourself in that living room — or, more likely, in your own past. The characters are shopworn, but their connections embody what's enjoyable about a family's shared customs.

Don't expect the exhilaration of innovative comedy or people with surprises in store. The play survives on such thin characters simply because they're good souls with the best intentions. These are imaginary grandparents, ready to prompt happy memories.