A wedding turns into a funeral in Brian Friel's "Aristocrats," the play by one of Northern Ireland's most masterful dramatists that is now heralding the start of Strawdog Theatre's 20th anniversary season. Along the way, long-cherished fairy tales are stripped bare to reveal some painful truths. And out of those truths come a certain degree of rebirth, or at least understanding.

Friel's play, which dates from 1979, serves as a perfect example of why this 78-year-old writer (also the author of "Dancing at Lughnasa") is continually referred to as "The Chekhov of Ireland." Full to bursting with battered hearts, broken dreams, failed expectations and the drinking, depression and near-hysteria all this can trigger, "Aristocrats" captures a family in the years long before both peace and an economic boom worked their changes on Northern Ireland.

There is, of course, a crucial historical reason why the O'Donnells, the family at the center of Friel's play, are so troubled. They were the rare wealthy, highly educated Roman Catholic family in a town where Protestant "colonizers" held most of the power and money. They were, by default, near-royalty to the vast population of Catholic peasants. And the tyrannical patriarch of the family, now on his deathbed, never let his five children forget they were the elite "aristocrats" of the play's title. In doing so, he warped their sense of self, killed many possibilities for their happiness and condemned them to lives of extreme isolation, exile and confusion.

These children, now troubled adults, include Judith (Anita B. Deely), the martyred older daughter who cares for her invalid father in the "great house on the hill," with assistance from Willie (Kyle Hamman), a devoted local; Alice (Jennifer Avery, an actress whose emotional life invariably runs deep), who married a working-class local, Eamon (a searingly intelligent Michael Dailey) and moved to London, where she is lonely, childless and drawn to drink; the severely depressive Claire (Shannon Hoag, wonderfully childlike in a desperate way), a gifted pianist whose career dreams were thwarted by her father; Casimir (John Henry Roberts in a truly stunning, altogether extraordinary performance), whose all-pervasive fantasy life knows no bounds, and the self-exiled Anna (Kat McDonnell), heard only on a tape sent from Africa, where she is a nun.

What brings the siblings home is Claire's imminent wedding to a local widower 30 years her senior -- a marriage about which Claire has huge doubts. And what adds perspective is the presence of Tom (Tom Hickey), an American doctoral candidate chronicling the very particular sociology of this Northern Irish society.

To direct, Strawdog has tapped Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Rick Snyder who, not surprisingly, has become very much an "actors' director," and here he elicits both fine ensemble work and exquisitely crafted individual performances. The play takes a while to reach its full momentum (blame Friel for this), but there are big emotional payoffs well before the end. Applause, too, for set designer B. Emil Bulous' wonderful total-environment set -- a crumbling stone manor and gazebo that work small miracles in Strawdog's atmospheric but imperfect space.