“He puts the cock in Caucasian!”

Diane Brown may be in character as she says her line, but there’s a sparkle in her eyes. It’s a groaner of a joke, but also winkingly provocative and deliberately shocking, just like the play it comes from.

Brown is in rehearsals for the North American premiere of 5 @ 50, Brad Fraser’s wickedly raw and ribald script about five friends forced to face up to some hard, complicated truths when they clumsily attempt to stage an intervention after one of the group overindulges at her 50th birthday.

But right now, Brown and the rest of the powerhouse, award-winning ensemble of theatre vets—Beatrice Zeilinger, Donna Yamamoto, Deborah Williams, and Veena Sood—are getting punchy. The music cue starts just as lunch break is called and it sparks a spontaneous sing-along to Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n Roll”.

Fraser himself couldn’t have hoped for anything more perfect when he crafted 5 @ 50, which is a welcome overcorrection to the oft-depicted notion that women over 50 are sexless, soft, and simple.

“It’s the best part of Sex and the City—the brazenness and the friendship between the gals—but it’s Brad Fraser, so it’s way more in-your-face, and it feels more relevant and powerful,” Brown tells the Straight. She’s seated next to director Cameron Mackenzie, who was Brown’s assistant during theatre school a number of years ago, coincidentally on a production that starred Zeilinger. He pitched the script to Brown, suggesting a coproduction between their two companies: her Ruby Slippers Theatre and his Zee Zee Theatre.

The characters, they agree, are a mess, but also heartbreakingly human.

“They’ve left some issues they probably should have dealt with earlier,” Brown says with a laugh, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant, doesn’t mean it’s not true. They’re not sentimental, it’s not cute, it’s real.” They’re not “just” grandmas or stay-at-home moms, Brown continues. “They have their flaws and they have their larger lives, they have their internal lives and struggles. It’s tragically rare that women of a certain age get to be on-stage or on-screen.”

“And the piece was written in that vein,” Mackenzie adds. “Brad has a beautiful introduction in the script, he came to it from that desire to put five fully rounded, three-dimensional characters on-stage who happen to all be women and who happen to all be of a certain age. That’s so important, that we have this work out there so we can break some of these stupid stereotypes of what women should be and shouldn’t be. I love their brazenness and the way they talk about sex and drugs and alcoholism, and the way they deal with each other and their friends. There’s nothing, as you said, sentimental about it, but there’s nothing too stereotyped either.”

5 @ 50 also upends the tired cliché that all women are catty or inevitably turn on each other. The characters go all the way back to high school, their friendship forged in the commiseration of being left on the sidelines at a dance. These are complicated, fraught relationships and 5 @ 50 affords them the space to explore conflict and evolve. Brown says it’s important to note the relationships, because that’s what differentiates these women from their classic male counterpart going through a “midlife crisis” with the secretary and the sports car.

“The women turn to each other and talk really frankly about it, and it takes them awhile to actually do some personal growth, but their first reaction is to bond and go to each other,” Brown says. “That’s their saving grace, their love for each other, and that’s what saves their dignity. But it also gives them hope to carry on, deal with some shit, and leave these addictions behind. Everybody grows a little bit in this play, so there’s some hope. It comes at a great price, but they start to gain some awareness, some responsibility.”

Ruby Slippers Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre present 5 @ 50 at the PAL Studio Theatre to May 28.