Any account of five generations of a family may require a genealogical tree to understand who’s who. Firelight Theatre Workshop manages this feat with restaurant tables in its production of “The Big Meal,” Dan Franc’s play about family and other relationships over the course of 80 years. 

Performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. through May 18 at the Firelight studio at 70 Main St., No. 204 in Peterborough.

The work involves a stream of characters, from a matriarch and patriarch to youngsters, yet the show keeps them straight -- and a family tree as part of the program helps. Tara Kessler, a board member of Firelight, called the production a “life-affirming play that follows a family over five generations as they experience love, loss, and the unplanned.” Characters work through all this at cafe tables in a space intimate to the point that audience members might feel as though they are at neighboring tables eavesdropping on conversations.

Characters and dialogue hit the ground running in every scene. Kessler said the play honors the major and minor moments in life, “and how it all goes so fast.” Indeed, fast describes that pace of the production, and emotions and colorful language fill the space in the Guernsey Building where the play is performed. Characters in “The Big Meal” interrupt and talk over each other at times, with banter that seems most genuine.

Nora Fiffer and Jason Lambert direct “The Big Meal.” They founded Firelight in 2017, and three years later, the New Hampshire Theatre Alliance awarded Fiffer “Best Director and Best Production.” Originally from the Monadnock region, Lambert shared the NHTA award, and is an Ewing Art Award winner. Firelight has been named “Best Experimental Theatre” by New Hampshire Magazine, and has drawn thespians whose first passion was something other than theater. 

“I trained to be an opera signer,” said Jazimina Creamer-MacNeil during a recent dress rehearsal.  She is the props designer for the play, and recalls seeing the company put on “Skylight” several years ago.

“I saw my first performance here and was hooked,” she said.

The production premiered in Chicago in 2011 went to New York a year later. Eight players – Jeremy Appleton, Gina Carballo, Laura Carden, Bill Cass, Rutsi Cohen, Tori Haring-Smith, Isaiah Lapierre and Van Stahlin – portray 18 characters over the course of the 90-minute production. Sarah Sandback designed the set.

Tickets range from $20 to $40, and are available at firelighttheatreworkshop.com.