Trevor Schmidt’s latest comedy, Iron Matron, has two more shows in its run, finishing with a matinee and an evening show on Saturday November 7th. If you like kind-hearted and funny shows about getting older, about old friendships and new balances, and about second chances, you should make time to see it!

The action is all set in Alice (Pamela Schmunk)’s garage – or, she explains, the garage of her son and daughter-in-law, underneath the “mother-in-law suite” she lives in. It’s the cleanest and most organized garage-space I’ve ever seen – but there are reasons for that, explained later.

The play starts with Alice making awkward conversation with an old classmate she’d lost touch with, Corinne (Linda Glass). Alice is divorced – she fits that into the conversations frequently. Alice is a charming mix of insecurity and obliviousness, a 60-year-old Tigger in baggy flowered overalls, and Corinne is poise personified in tasteful shades of mint and rose. (Costumes by Schmidt). So Alice keeps making suggestions or asking questions that Corinne dodges, and Alice doesn’t notice. Alice wants to learn guitar and start a band, and since Corinne teaches music she wants Corinne to join. Corinne makes it clear, at least to the audience, that she has quite enough going on in her life and isn’t enthusiastic about this crazy project, but Alice persists and Corinne gives in.

They aren’t very good. At all. Maybe hiring a drummer will help? So they post an ad somewhere, and Rita (Pat Darbasie) shows up. Rita’s an arthritic butch lesbian in leather and ink, travelling everywhere with drumsticks and liniment. More relevantly, she’s been a career touring musician but she’s between gigs and willing to help them out. Alice resists at first, telling Corinne that adding a third to a group always messes things up and creates conflict. But as the three women start to practise and start to talk, it becomes clear that shaking things up might be good for all of them! Whether or not the friendship worked well when Allie and Corrie were young, the patterns clearly aren’t helpful any more. And Rita’s an outsider, here for a job rather than to make friends in the suburbs, so she sees them more clearly and asks about some of what she sees.

I love stories where the characters being themselves is the funny part, and Iron Matron is great for that. I hadn’t seen Pamela Schmunk on stage before, but I kept thinking that Alice was someone I knew. Linda Grass had a beautiful portrayal of a woman successfully holding it together, and Pat Darbasie’s Rita was so different from any character I’d seen her play before, hilariously believable.

Like the younger characters Patty and Joanne in Schmidt’s show last year, Alice is looking for a project of her own, but also for community. Iron Matron is a fascinating new take on similar themes, but with women who are at older stages of life. It also made me think about how the lessons in building friends and allies learned by junior-high girls in Robot Girls aren’t permanent, but should equip the characters better to cope with the challenges they might encounter in their 40s (How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Dance Cup Competition) and in their 60s (Iron Matron)

Trevor Schmidt consistently captures the feeling of conversations among women who don’t quite get each other, but who aren’t mean about it. And by the end I liked all of them and respected all of them, and I wanted to see the characters again.

But if you want to see them, you need to hurry. There are two shows today (Saturday) at the Studio at the Arts Barns, and tickets are here.