If you did miss Unity (1918)–there were only four performances over last weekend–it’s too bad because tickets were only $5-$10, and the play is quite good. Now you may have been thinking to yourself: A play by Cornish drama students about the 1918 influenza pandemic…is slightly less appealing than the flu itself.

I don’t blame you, and that’s why, in fact, I was willing to put myself in harm’s way. You are not fools, and you deserve to hear when it’s not an act of outrageous optimism to attend a student play. In this case, I was curious to see the direction of drama dynamo Marya Sea Kaminski, and guessed, correctly, that she’d do something worth seeing.

Kevin Kerr‘s play Unity (1918) takes place in the small town of Unity out on the Saskatchewan prairies, in October and November of that year. The influenza pandemic spurred by the First World War is just breaching the defense of remoteness, as soldiers return home. Kerr grew up out there, and it shows in his treatment of the town and its people; he won a Governor General’s award (a Canadian honor) for the play in 2002.

Kerr was born in 1968, so he’s young for a playwright but not, thankfully, precocious. His play’s language is an appealing, atmospheric hybrid of lean, punchy drama and a more literate, alone-with-your-thoughts tone that at least sounds like the era. One reviewer described the play as Our Town meets A Journal of the Plague Year: diarist narration provided by Bea(atrice) introduces you to the characters and to the loneliness of life out there.

Yet the play gets more laughs than you’d expect as people begin to die right and left. It’s a surprised or giddy laughter drawn often from incongruity: corpses fart emphatically, and the constant strain of avoiding contagion leads to odd behaviors. Flu is just one more difficulty the people of Unity face. It was a hard life and death was–if not over-familiar–no stranger.

Happily, Kerr mostly foregoes emphasizing the “socially relevant” issues (wooden dildo aside) in favor of directing your attention to the story’s setting in 1918. (Relevancy is not a theatrical attribute, but a personal feeling you have, as you make a connection that matters to you. Most of the time, when people say a play is relevant, they just mean topical.) The town will, of course, turn on itself out of fear. But the lesson is that the War, the flu, your life will end.

Cornish fielded a cast that only vaguely reminded me of that TV network where everyone is 25 years old and more attractive than normal: Lindsay Corbett’s Bea is the repressed heart of the play–she’s so adoring of wedding-planning Mary (Shauna Friedenberger) and her long-distance soldier boyfriend that she invents an unlikely passion for a soldier herself, knitting socks for care packages. But she’s also tight on the reins of younger sister Sissy (Sami Detzer, an excitable yeller), who is convinced the Bible predicts the world’s end in 1918 and wants to get it on before the Rapture.

As the 15-year-old Icelandic immigrant and pro tem undertaker Sunna, Ellen Steves is full of a stolid gravitas not right for the character’s age. Yet, if you forget the age business, her Sunna is formidable, a bare-knuckles survivor. Rose (Lauren Brazell) and Doris (Heidi Korndorffer) run the town’s switchboard, and provide Kerr with the chance to throw out some crackerjack phone patter. Switchboard gags are in short supply these days.

Daniel Nickerson had a great, overwhelmed rant on the phone, as Stan, ringing around the town after his wife dies to see if any single girl will just, you know, move in and look after the baby. Michael (Andrew Buffelen) is a nice boy, slightly off-kilter but bursting with kind things to say and do. You know right away that he will a) die and b) become an ersatz symbol and plot device.

It’s Derek Petropolis’s performance as Hart, the blinded soldier with “no place else to go,” that is truly memorable. He’s indefatigably cheerful, eternally bemused, in the way that someone is after an bad accident. There’s no offending him, but he’s not home, either. He’s having an ongoing out-of-body experience.

Director Kaminski pulls all this together into a miracle of timing, a series of mistaken trips from moment to moment so that the play feels like an uninterrupted, inevitable fall. It is not a fall from a great height–the drama is small town, familial–but it leaves you with skinned palms and a concussion. The 1918 flu hit like a bomb.