Dobama's pilgrimage: Heather Anderson Boll, Robert Hawkes, Anne McEvoy, Liz Conway,

Ever since Dobama Theatre was forced to vacate its leaky Coventry basement, it's become our theatrical Flying Dutchman, forlornly drifting between ports in search of a permanent haven. Periodically the ship appears out of the fog as an abject showboat, besotted with PC attempts and laden with a bountiful crew of troubadours. These hearties are all eager to perform tales of the disenfranchised, epics of alienation and rhapsodies of dysfunctional families.

Presently the theater is docked at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Tremont, with an archetypal, but happily chosen, Mom's-got-cancer play, entitled Colder Than Here. Britisher Laura Wade's 2005 comedy-drama offers the audience an opportunity to experience this scrappy little theater at one of its industrious high points.

Every literate filmgoer recalls Ingmar Bergman's personification of death in The Seventh Seal as a glacial aristocrat, inspiring awe and terror among a medieval populace. Wade takes a different tack. Her vision of death is more akin to a Dr. Phil lesson on healing, bringing together alienated couples and curing food disorders. Her writing style brings to mind a cross between Noel Coward's domestic essays on the eccentricities of the British working class and director Mike Leigh's cinematic studies of the neuroses of the same group.

A key to Wade's pungent style is when the working-class father is berated for reading his newspaper while Mom is planning her funeral. In a response that Coward might have envied, he comments: "A watched pot never boils."

With the wrong kind of production, this play could easily have turned distastefully maudlin or fake British-y. But fortunately at the helm is director Joel Hammer, Cleveland's answer to Mike Nichols. Like the latter, Hammer's common sense is almost mystical. He can make the most torturous theatrical whirlpool pleasantly flow like a picturesque brook. Wade's play functions on two levels: first, as a general satire on the absurdities of funeral rituals, and, secondly, as a dubious but heartening lesson of how a death in the family can deepen and liberate its various members.

Hammer elucidates the author's theses by clearly delineating the changes that each of those members experience. Anne McEvoy's mother starts out as the ultimate caretaker, worrying over creating the perfect picnic lunch to tempt her formerly bulimic daughter. Through the evening, we see her gradually give up her micromanagement to let others help plan her funeral. First depicted as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty out of Bedlam, Heather Anderson Boll's daughter adeptly lightens before our eyes to accept romance, responsibility and her mother's passing.

In the most difficult role, Liz Conway succinctly illuminates the torments of the hemmed-in, dutiful daughter, while Robert Hawkes' father masks his pain in a bluff heartiness, making his eventual tender reconciliation with his wife all the more affecting. Having to evoke a multitude of disparate locations in the inhospitable Pilgrim Church venue, set designer Ben Needham and lighting designer Michael Boll work miracles of efficiency on an undoubted minimum budget.

Those devotees inclined to seek out Dobama's various ports of call will be here well rewarded for their loyal peregrinations.

Colder Than Here: Through March 23 by Dobama Theatre at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 2592 W. 14th St., 216.932.3396.