What better time than the day after the State of the Union address to be reminded that exaggeration, obfuscation, and just-plain-making-shit-up can be employed for benign purposes as well as sinister ones? Solas Nua’s Trad is a show that delights in benevolent hyperbole like no other in recent memory, and its pleasures are plentiful indeed. Playwright Mark Doherty’s wry, spry meditation on tradition and familial identity and especially — O! How we we wish there was another word for this! — blarney, falls somewhere in between Waiting for Godot and Waking Ned Devine on the sliding scale of existential Irish fearlessness vs. adorable, tweed-jacketed stereotypes.

Of course, stereotypes are largely the point here. Doherty seems to have written his 2004 play as a response to having heard an earful about the nobility of Irish suffering, and since the butt of the joke is not his native land’s tragic history of crop failures and wars with the English, but rather the peculiar Irish way of mythologizing misfortune, you can laugh your arse off guilt-free.

And you shall! Anybody who ever squirmed through a lecture from an elder authority figure about how much rougher things were back then will have a hard time suppressing a smile when Da, the one-legged paterfamilias indefatigable of this surreal road-movie of a play, wistfully recalls “the oxygen ban of 1916,” among the other privations and indignities he’s weathered in his years. How many years? Well, his son Son is 100, so Da, upon some reflection, reckons he would be, well, older than that.

Michael John Casey and Chris Davenport strap on their legs and go a-walkin’ in Solas Nua’s Trad. Photo by Chris Davenport.