Blow the lid off the joint but do it genteelly, won't you?

The Guthrie Theater is getting ready to bring the lights up on one of its most surprising productions — a guffaw-fest of a farce set during the turbulent 1960s.

Playwright Pearl Cleage's "The Nacirema Society" broadens and even counterprograms our understanding of civil rights-era Alabama, a milieu that's likely to evoke images of firehoses and fearsome dog attacks on marchers seeking to make America live up to its ideals.

While such indelible images tell some of the story of what was going on during that time, they don't encompass the totality of experiences, said Greta Oglesby, who portrays grande dame Grace Dubose Dunbar in "Nacirema."

The comedy centers on upper-crust Black women who're preparing for a centennial cotillion in 1964 Montgomery, Ala., even as protesters gather to march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

The ball debutantes include Gracie Dunbar (Nubia Monks), granddaughter of grande dame Dunbar. Grace's best friend is another doyenne, Catherine Adams Green (Regina Marie Williams), who hopes that her grandson, Bobby Green (Darrick Mosley), will soon be engaged to Gracie.

The kids, of course, have other ideas even as subterfuges and schemes unfold.

"This is the kind of play that I've never had the pleasure of being in before," said Williams, who has been performing on Minnesota stages for nearly four decades and who is often competing at auditions with many of the women in the room. "A farce with Black women is like a party with all these beautiful people up here cutting up and ultimately loving on each other while inviting everybody in."

Williams spoke in an interview during a rehearsal break, a session attended by other cast members, including Oglesby, who broke into a smile as she watched her longtime friend and sometimes audition-room competitor.

"It's a big, ol' fat comedy about family, love and the secrets that we keep," Oglesby said.

America, I see you

That's not to say that "Nacirema" obscures or totally ignores serious subjects. The title of the play, after all, is "American" spelled backward. Cleage set the action a century after the Civil War at a time of another crucible sometimes described as the second civil war.

The show's families — wealthy, educated and sophisticated — are among the elite that intellectual titan W.E.B. DuBois championed in a 1903 essay as "the talented tenth." Their family members would have had membership in things like the Divine Nine, as the Black fraternities and sororities are called, and with children in social groups such as Jack & Jill, and with parents and grandparents in the Links Inc., and the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, popularly known as the Boulé.

In other words, they are American success stories.

"In this country, there have always been Black people who learned capitalism very quickly and made money," "Nacirema" director Valerie Curtis-Newton told the cast on the first day of rehearsal, March 18. "This play asserts that there were generations of free people who … celebrate their freedom."

Just how different are the Dunbars and the Greens?

Well, "they have been avid readers for 100 years," said Aimee K. Bryant, who plays Alpha Campbell Jackson, the daughter of the Dunbars' longtime domestic helper. Alpha knows the Dunbars better than they know themselves. "But they're still human and can do foolish things."

"Nacirema" also throws the action back to a time when the idea of society, as evidenced by debutante balls, was much more important. In fact, Joy Dolo plays an investigative reporter in the play who is covering the ball.

Her character, Janet Logan, has written a scathing report about the family. This time she's trying to make amends by offering fluffy coverage.

"There are so many different binaries here — the family is in the South and Janet comes from the North, we have the workers and those being taken care of," Dolo said. "I hope that people come and appreciate it for what it is. When we hear about 1964, we think heartbreak and heaviness. And while all of that happened, this play is about the lightness and levity, the humanity of families loving on each other."

Bryant also has been pondering how to describe the new experience of being in "Nacirema."

"When people ask me, I tell them that it's a Black play that's not about racism," Bryant said. "It's a play about the South that's about money. And it's lots of old money."

Curtis-Newton, who memorably directed "Trouble in Mind" at the Guthrie in 2016, told the cast that the stakes are high for "Nacirema." For the story falls into America's quintessential quest.

"The main question of this play is how do you bridge the gap … between classes, generations [and] strategies for liberation," Curtis-Newton said. "How do we all get free is the end goal, and the bridge we're trying to build is the bridge to freedom."

She and her cast just want the trip across that bridge to be hysterically funny.

'The Nacirema Society'

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 7 p.m. Sun. Ends May 25.

Tickets: $32-$92, 612-377-2224, guthrietheater.org.