If you’re still craving stories from Lake Wobegon, Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of Float offers maybe not a cure, but a dose of comfort food with a bracing snort of rum and reality.

As with former Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor’s little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve, you can’t let the cheesy Christmas music, the tacky holiday sweaters or the sharp one-liners among the five characters fool you: This Patricia Kane play, set in the fictional Illinois town of Budapest — pronounced Boo-DA-pest, longtime residents Doodee Helverson and Arletta Nitz will have you know — is no light comedy.

As in many, if not all, small towns, everybody knows each others’ peculiarities and secrets, and some can’t help casting judgment while carrying on with timeworn traditions and relationships. In Kane’s Budapest, they all bubble to the surface in the barn where Doodee (Laine Gillespie), Arletta (Kim Meredith), Luce Ellers (Lanni Luce West) and relative newcomers Char Bennett (Brandy Zarle) and Marty Luedtke (Jeannie Hines) assemble and decorate the Budapest Women’s Club float for the town’s annual Christmas parade during the first act, and dismantle it in the second.

Under the direction of Bill Coons, the cast seamlessly reveals a parade of sadness, disappointments, hopes and dreams realized and dashed and, perhaps most of all, changes that some are embracing with more enthusiasm than others. Individually and collectively, the actors maintain the timeliness and thought-provoking nature of Shaker Bridge’s season of plays by women.

While Zarle, playing the divorced real-estate broker struggling to sell properties, is the Equity professional in the ensemble, Gillespie, Meredith, West and Hines all demonstrate their long experience in other Shaker Bridge productions and with Upper Valley shows by the Parish Players, Pentangle Arts and North Country Community Theatre.

Meredith delivers Arletta’s malapropisms and zingers with unapologetic zest — think character actor June Squibb as the cranky, disaffected wife and mother in the movie Nebraska — then turns on a dime with the plea, “We can’t afford to lose anybody!” when a new relationship between two members of the club threatens to blow up another, longstanding one.

Gillespie meanwhile, ranges through Doodee’s swings from exasperation and resignation to fear and betrayal, speaking as many volumes with wide, sad eyes as with her lines. Most poignant among the latter, Doodee, taking

cold comfort in the club’s winning yet another Mayor’s Award for the best float, sighs and declares, “You put so much effort into it and POOF! It’s gone.”

The effort that the actors and Coons put into staging Kane’s story, on the other hand, will linger long after its run ends later this month.

Shaker Bridge Theatre stages Float at Whitney Hall in Enfield on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 and on Sunday afternoon at 2:30. The production runs through Dec. 18. For tickets ($32) and more information, visit shakerbridgetheatre.org or call 603-448-3750.

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.