Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” currently onstage at Old Academy Players, presents the strangest birthday party you will ever attend. As Lenny Magrath (Jennifer Sivers-Roberts) turns 30, she and her two sisters wrestle with personal problems that evoke a rural Mississippi in 1974.

Thanks to director Christopher Wunder’s atmospheric set design, the action takes place in the family’s yellowish, homespun kitchen. A disconsolate Lenny sits alone at the checkered table, wedging a birthday candle into a cookie. Soon, Meg (Laura Young) and Babe (Serena Pearl) arrive, and the black humor and chaos of the sisters’ lives comes into focus.

Each is a vivid trainwreck. Meg abandoned the family to pursue her dream of becoming a Hollywood star but returned home in defeat. Babe just shot her husband Zackery because, “I didn’t like his looks.” Lenny is the dutiful one who nursed their ailing grandfather until he was hospitalized. Now alone, she bemoans her unromantic and childless life.

Pearl tackles Babe with conviction. As she awaits trial, Babe has only her sisters and her saxophone for solace. Zackery survived the shooting and, in a telephone call from the hospital, threatens to commit Babe to a mental hospital. When Barnette Lloyd (Kyle Mitchell), a motivated attorney, visits to plan her defense, he teases out the actual reasons for the crime.

It was a crime of the heart. Pearl’s Babe is an empath, open to her feelings and those of others. And yet, impulsive and naive, Babe acts on her own feelings, unmindful of the consequences.

Even as we discover Babe’s reality, we also learn about the inner workings of the community that helped shape her life. It all comes to a head late when Meg consoles Babe with a gloriously tragicomic remark: “Why, you are as perfectly sane as anyone walking the streets of Hazlehurst, Mississippi.”

Young’s Meg was apparently a flirty seductress who destroyed the dreams of “Doc” Porter (Eric Rupp) before she fled town. Yet her lack of a flirtatious bearing makes sense because each sister ventures into the world with a contrived self, engineered by men’s expectations. But inside the family hearth, truth prevails as their false faces slide off.

The intrusions of Chick Boyle (Samantha Simpson), a family cousin, underscore the interplay between individual and community. Simpson revels in the role. Full of flounce, snarky talk, and ill-will, her only concern is that Babe’s and Meg’s scandalous behavior damages her social standing.

But Chick barely has time to declare she is through with the Magrath family trash before Lenny broomsticks her out of the kitchen. Sivers-Roberts excels throughout as mousy Lenny, a de facto mother figure with no life of her own. But by play’s end, she finds her voice and presides over her birthday party — even though it comes a day late.

“Crimes of the Heart” won the Pulitzer in 1981 for good reason. Henley holds your attention with a steady stream of quirky, family revelations I leave you to discover. Beyond storytelling skill, she creates a vision of the insular, rural south. It is 1974, but you would think the civil rights revolution was not underway, and the Vietnam War was not raging.

In Henley’s vision, retreat from the larger world does not lead to cozy community life. Quite the contrary. In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic genre, rural isolation only leads to more estrangement, and grotesquerie thrives behind a veil of decorum.

“Crimes of the Heart” at Old Academy Players, 3544 Indian Queen Lane., through Sept. 28. For tickets or more information, contact 215-843-1109 or oldacademyplayers.org.