
www.newtheatre.com/cs/cs.html
Anyone who went to church as a kid can laugh at the church politics in "Church Basement Ladies," but there are several more levels of appreciation for me.
1) It pokes gentle fun of Minnesota, where my sis-in-law is from
2) My brother and I, being Preachers' Kids, saw much that was true to our experience 3) It pokes gentle fun at Lutherans, whose dual factions, the Norwegian Lutherans and the German Lutherans shall never join forces.
4) In poking fun of Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, the spoken dialect is reminiscent of our years in South Dakota, as well.
5) Anyone from Minnesota should find amusement as the small town ladies do a song about how wicked "the Cities" are (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
6) A Lutheran girl who goes to the twin cities, ("The Sodom and Gommorah of the Plains") for college, falls in love with a Catholic boy. This is not so scandalous now as it was in the fifties, when the play is set.
7) The pastor, a widower, married an Italian gal. She not only is several years younger than the pastor, but is NOT Nordic in background! At a church dinner, filled with all the usual bland, monochromatic foods, this gal sets down a pan of lasagna, and it just sets the tongues a-waggin'!"
A lot of the above happened in the first installment, not the sequel from 2009, but you get the point. Small towns, resistance to change, etc.