Pictured is the cast for the BTCPA’s production of ‘Dearly Departed’. Seated on floor (L to R): Jean Marie Moore, Calleigh Stacy and Nate Moore. Seated (L to R): Anne Vinson, Nathan Strickland, Mary-Elizabeth Moore, Lisa Massey, Jerry Self, Carol Murphree, Chloe Brown, and Marge Lichtenthaler. Standing (L to R): Rhett Jackson, Randy Mink, Dora Wallace, Dustin Edmonson, Emily Patterson and Jim Lichtenthaler.

The Bay Tree Council for the Performing Arts in Red Bay will present its final performance for the 2013-2014 season, Dearly Departed, by David Bottrell and Jessie Jones and directed by Mark Richardson.

It will be presented this Thursday, April 24, through Saturday, April 26, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, April 27, at 2 p.m., at Community Spirit Bank’s Weatherford Centre in Red Bay.

Tickets are currently on sale at the Weatherford Centre from 2-4 p.m. each weekday, or by calling 256-356-9829 to reserve tickets. For group sales, contact Beth Hammock at 256-356-9286.

This play was presented in Red Bay around ten years ago and was so well received that many requested that it be brought back.

In the Baptist backwoods of the Bible Belt, the beleaguered Turpin family proves that living and dying in the South are seldom tidy and always hilarious. Despite their earnest efforts to pull themselves together for their father’s funeral, the Turpins’ other problems keep overshadowing the solemn occasion: firstborn Ray-Bud drinks himself silly as the funeral bills mount; Junior, the younger son, is juggling financial ruin, a pack of no-neck monster kids, and a wife who suspects him of infidelity in the family car; their spinster sister, Delightful, copes with death as she does life, by devouring junk food; and all the neighbors add more than their two cents. As the situation becomes fraught with mishap, Ray-Bud says to his long-suffering wife, “When I die, don’t tell nobody. Just bury me in the backyard and tell everybody I left you.”

Amidst the chaos, the Turpins turn for comfort to their friends and neighbors, an eccentric community of misfits who manages to pull together and help each other through their hours of need, and finally, the funeral.