By Stacey Kaser and Alison Kelly. Directed by Katrina Dunn. A Gateway Theatre production. At the Gateway Theatre on October 10. Continues until October 25

There’s a lot of wit in Conversations With My Mother, which offers some original twists on the question of whether women can have it all. But the story takes a long time to come into focus.

The play opens with the abrupt death of Hyacinth, mother to two middle-aged daughters, Lily and Heather. In the next scene, as the daughters prepare for her funeral, we hear Hyacinth’s voice in their heads. But it turns out it’s not just in their heads: Hyacinth has been turned back from the afterlife by the spirit of her own mother—a trailblazer who was the first woman to graduate from her medical school—and she doesn’t know why. It seems to have something to do with her daughters, to whom she appears as a ghost.

Playwrights Stacey Kaser and Alison Kelly mill some good one-liners from Hyacinth’s undeadness, but the laughs come at the expense of a clear story. As a friend pointed out after the show, the central conflict between Hyacinth and her daughters—the degree to which she has supported their pursuit of career (Heather) or motherhood (Lily)—would have much higher stakes if Hyacinth were still alive. Instead, most of the first act is taken up with situational humour and backstory; the conflict I’ve just described doesn’t sharpen until somewhere into the second act. That leaves us a long time to wonder why we’re watching.

But at least we’re laughing; Kaser and Kelly can be very funny. When Lily puts on a pair of high heels, Hyacinth’s voice chides, “Your breasts will sway like chandeliers on the Titanic.” At the funeral, Lily and Heather complain about the boring eulogy, then remember that their mother’s “only real hobby was smoking”—an observation borne out by the ghostly Hyacinth’s repeated attempts to replicate that earthly pleasure by sucking empty air through her outstretched fingers. And the climactic scene offers a whole new twist on the deus ex machina—I can’t say more without giving away a big surprise. Director Katrina Dunn’s casting is perfect for this material: cowriter Kelly (Heather), Deborah Williams (Lily), and Patti Allan (Hyacinth) are all actors with wicked comic chops who also know how to zero in on the heartache beneath the laughs.

Drew Facey’s gorgeous set, with its enormous upstage cherry tree in full blossom and symmetrical furniture that undergoes ingenious transformations, provides a fitting home for these characters, who ultimately pose relevant and important questions about what it means to be a successful woman. I just wish they didn’t have to spend so long getting there.