“Wintertime” brought a balance of emotion and laughs Friday at the Holmes Student Center.

The show, written by playwright Charles Mee, tells the story of a dysfunctional family.

The son, Jonathan, brings his girlfriend, Ariel, to the family home in hopes of proposing to her over the holidays. Little does he know his mother, Maria, and her lover, Francois, are there spending quality time together over the holidays, too. On top of having his mother and her lover there, Jonathan’s father, Frank, and his father’s lover, Edmund, decide to spend time there.

“My favorite character is definitely the boyfriend, Jonathan,” said attendee Joshua Ott, senior mechanical engineer major. “He was kind of on the outside of the mother, mother’s lover, father and father’s lover intertangled mix.”

The show offers audience members a great mixture of laughs and sentimental moments. In one scene, Francois, played by sophomore acting major T.C. Fair, looks to win Maria back for good, so he speaks to Edmund for advice. This leads to a strip tease to see if Francois can be sexy for Maria, and he ends up standing on the stage in a corset and black panties.

“The hardest scene is the strip scene. It’s definitely a big challenge,” Fair said. “Just because you’re taking clothes off in front of so many people.”

The end of the first act has another memorable scene: a fight between Ariel and Jonathan. Everyone in the cast was doing something crazy that brought some audience members to tears from laughing so hard.

Jonathan threw himself against the wall while Ariel chewed chips and spit at him. Francois ripped up a teddy bear and threw the fluff up in the air and made angry grunting noises. This scene was timed so well that everything fit together and nothing felt out of place.

“The scene where they’re all flipping out on stage was one of my favorite scenes to watch,” said graduate acting student Jessica Rzucidlo.

One of the more sentimental and emotional scenes featured a funeral. At the end of the first act, the viewer learns Maria has fallen into the lake outside the home and slipped under the ice.

The second act opens with Maria’s funeral. The characters tell stories of dreams they had about her, how they met her and how much she meant to them. Hearing each person speak of her brings out beauty and emotions that sit under the surface.

Each character had a story to tell, some funny and some emotional. The funeral was a touching and wonderful contrast to the prior chaotic scenes.