By Trish Cooper. Directed by Donna Spencer. A Firehall Arts Centre production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Wednesday, November 25. Continues until December 5

Social Studies is all about family—both locally and globally. Like many families, it’s funny, fraught, and pulsating with love.

The play is set in 2006 in Winnipeg. Jackie has just left her marriage, but when she comes home to live with her mother, Val, and 16-year-old sister, Sarah, she finds her old bedroom occupied by Deng, a Lost Boy from South Sudan who has arrived in the city as a refugee. Deng has only been in the house for a week, but he already calls Val “Mum” and when he meets Jackie, he embraces her with a joyous cry of “Sister!” Deng complicates the family’s dynamic: Val is compelled to do right by him, Sarah has a crush, and Jackie is both resentful and suspicious.

Trish Cooper’s script is not conventionally plot-driven: while it’s eventful, there isn’t an overarching goal driving the action forward. That leads to some pacing problems late in the play, but they’re easy to overlook in light of Cooper’s considerable strengths at crafting fully dimensional characters and punchy comedic dialogue.

Director Donna Spencer’s spot-on casting capitalizes on each character’s complexity. Val is well-intentioned but slightly flaky: she drinks muskeg tea, belongs to a drum circle, and sprinkles a healthy dose of First-World guilt into her pre-dinner blessing. Susinn McFarlen does this type of character better than anyone in town, and she doesn’t disappoint here. Erin Moon takes Jackie through a big range of feelings; she’s convincingly depressed, furious, and hopeful, and she nails polite hostility in a scene in which Deng has helped himself to her breakfast. Lili Beaudoin finds nuance in all of Sarah’s adolescent contradictions—innocence and worldliness, recklessness and hesitation—as Richie Diggs slowly peels back the layers of Deng’s cheerful façade.

The show looks great, too: Alison Green’s warm, spacious set and Sabrina Evertt’s costumes evoke the cozy refuge of family in a cold Winnipeg winter.

Differences between the characters fuel a lot of the humour, like when Sarah describes Deng as “suuuuper-black” or when he tries to wrap his head around the family’s tolerance for “the gay people”. But their acceptance of those differences leads to even funnier lines: Jackie invites Val to watch a film with her, saying, “There’s so much injustice and poverty in this movie—you will love it.”

Acceptance is ultimately what Social Studies is about. That makes it not only funny and moving, but very, very timely.