Some families have secrets, but the Nowak family's was so shrouded, none of them even knew it. It was disguised so convincingly by another fun family fact - grandpa was once visited in 1943 by the blessed virgin Mary in ghost form - that there wasn't any room for a secret.
There was barely room inside that reality for anyone with the Nowak name to even have a normal life.
Christmas miracles have a way of changing the course of history, one family at a time. This one is the Miracle On South Division Street by playwright Tom Dudzick.
But a miracle also has a way of turning into myth, story taking on an environment of its own, and meshing with other myths and stories.
The surviving Nowak family - adult siblings Ruth, Jimmy and Beverly and their mother Clara - have grown up stewing in the broth of grandpa's miracle, and adding their own ingredients as their lives unfolded.
But one of them is about to spill the stew, or something, the others know not what, they just know one of them, Ruth, has called a meeting and it is something about the statue grandpa built to the memory of that holy visit.
It's a statue that has become a local shrine and a source of touristic pilgrimage in their neighbourhood over the decades, and it has also towered over their own personal journeys from childhood to adulthood, from religious rites to humanistic realizations.
Prince George gets to be a fly on the wall of the Nowaks as they brace themselves for whatever Ruth might have to tell them, but they are also so alive with their own concerns that it's hard for her to get a word in edgewise.
Since this is a play and we are the audience, we literally sit down around their kitchen table as they hash it out.
What's not a secret is the quality of this production.
The family matriarch Clara is played by a woman with an Oscar nomination in her past, and when Linda Goranson turns on the motherly spunk and its shimmering shades of parental dictatorship, confusion, fear and adoring love, it's easy to understand how she came to be such a beloved figure in the Canadian theatrical family.
She would sit at the head of any actors' table, as she does at the Nowak's fictional one.
Her stage children are likewise chosen for their parts for their abundance of emotive skill. Corey Turner in the role of Jimmy just lets the lines run free and the laughter dangles on for dear life. He has a wise sense of voice tone and physical composure so the script's rippling humour tumbles out without unnecessary prodding.
Melissa Oei as Beverly is at once lovely and snappy.
She is "that sister" we may not have had ourselves, but we all knew growing up.
She is given some crackling dialogue, but she delivers it as much with her eyes and talk-to-the-hand attitudes as with her voice. Yet, and here's the real actor's skill, she never just fires darts. She is talking, conversing, she is in the moment not off to the side of it.
The heaviest lifting is done by Caitlin McCarthy, who succeeds in having us all believe is sweet, kindly, sensitive, but has grit and backbone in there too.
McCarthy has to show us someone out of control of the small picture but in command of the big one, but those dynamics also shift from time to time as the conversation unwinds.
And it all comes apart.
It falls to pieces in plot twist upon plot twist, uncoiling like the surprise innards of a baseball, if you've ever cut one of those open.
Like a baseball, a family never gets repacked exactly the same way after that.
Good thing it's one snappy one-liner and sarcastic firecracker after another, or the whole thing might be painful. It actually is painful, if you've ever had a deep desire to hold your family close and exhale all the accumulated hurts that build up over time.
There's just enough laughter to keep the tears at bay, at least most of the tears.
The script is a brilliant examination of how real life, superstition and devout faith all pinball off each other - especially at Christmas time. It's also about how blind faith can actually see some things clearly, if the right blindfolds are removed.
It is a family-friendly, laugh-out-loud, make-you-think, make-you-call-home kind of play, expertly unrolled by Prince George's longtime theatre master Ted Price, the director of this performance.
His partner in family and in theatre, Anne Laughlin, takes care of the production values like the pro Prince George well knows her to be.
The difference is this play, tenderly and tenaciously put together by Price and Laughlin, is a fundraiser for two of their favourite Prince George causes.
Every ticket sold puts food in the mouths of local children via the Salvation Army and African children via 27 Million Voices.
A raffle is also available at the performances to help fund these two powerful P.G. forces of help and intervention.
Miracle On South Division Street is on now at Art Space (brilliantly transformed into a cozy theatre) until Dec. 6.
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