Giving the three Prozorov sisters and Uncle Vanya a run for their money, the O’Donnells of Ballybeg Hall are trapped in the vines of circumstance and stasis that have grown over their lives. In this 1979 work, Irish craftsman Friel channels Chekhov more so than in his most renowned family drama also set in fictional Ballybeg, Dancing at Lughnasa. Gathered for the wedding of the youngest, the children of the provincial Irish “big house”—bred for leisure and shipped off to boarding school before age ten—are now a veritable rainbow of self-delusion. The elder sisters tinge the uselessness of their lives with whisky and routine: Jameson anesthetizes Alice against her fractured marriage, and Judith is stoically resigned to caring for both the rapidly declining house and its patriarch, their bedridden father, whose hysterical outbursts are heard via a baby monitor. Meanwhile, brother Casimir casts the darkest hue of denial, recalling eminent houseguests like Yeats, whom he’d be too young to remember as “vividly” as he claims, and possibly manic-depressive Claire wonders fleetingly if she should marry a man twice her age, then turns sunnily to a game of pretend croquet.

Given all this drama in the “big house,” Strawdog’s production, at least early in the show, is remarkably muted even for a play about characters who are relics of a disappearing past, studied in their natural habitat by a visiting American professor who’s penning a book about Irish-Catholic aristocracy. It’s likely the show’s initial inertia is not deliberate. Snyder’s precise and fine-spun direction of a Strawdog ensemble once again at the top of its game (Deely’s subtle Judith, Avery’s tense-jawed Alice and Roberts’ loopy and impeccably timed Casimir are particularly satisfying to watch) is clear not just to the eye and ear, but ultimately to the heart.