Two is the magic number. Two audience favorites, Carmen Decker and Lisa Bostnar, will open the season in Grace & Glorie, by Tom Ziegler. Opening night is June 15. The actresses performed the two character play together several years ago at the BoarsHead Theatre in Lansing, MI.

The play is set in a small rustic cabin the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Decker plays Grace, a 90-year old backwoods country woman, who is dying alone. Gloria, a much younger Harvard MBA, a refugee from the big city and a recent catastrophe, is a Hospice volunteer who is planning to put Grace’s death in order. In the course of the play, each learns something from the other.

“The show really played very well,” Carmen Decker recalled. “When I first read it, I thought it was formula. You know, country mouse, city mouse. You have to fight against that, but the playwright is fighting it for you. It’s simple and honest. It has a good sentimentality.’’

Bostnar agrees but gives her co-star the lion’s share of the credit. “In hands other than Carmen’s it could be trite,” she said of the play. “But in her hands, it’s transforming, honest and real....This is not a chick play. It’s universal. It’s about being open to learning. It’s not sappy. Grace is one tough cookie."

Grace is an ornery woman. She doesn’t have book smarts but a hard life has taught her ways to overcome difficulties. When Gloria barges in, with her take-charge, high-powered executive manner, Grace resists. “She thinks hospice is some new kind of Yankee concept,” Decker said.

Gloria, or “Glorie”, as Grace insists on calling her, is trying to put her life back together after the death of her son in an auto accident. “I play it honestly,” Bostnar said. “She’s searching for something. She’s in deep trouble. She’s looking hard for a reason to go on."

The two women are polar opposites and their clashes set off comic sparks. Grace has most of the funny lines in part because she’s the more uninhibited and outspoken of the two. “Grace is so like my mother, who died at age 99” Decker said. “She married a farmer and lived her whole life in one place.... She was a feisty lady with a wonderful outlook.” Decker says she didn’t inherit her mother’s optimism, but she did draw on her mother in creating Grace.

Decker just completed a show at BoarsHead, where she’s been for 33 years. She refuses to reveal her age, but notes that “very old people are the only thing offered to me.” Decker, who lives in Lansing, considers herself fortunate to have found the Michigan theatre. Many of the current Players, including artistic director Gus Kaikkonen, have worked at BoarsHead.

After working off-Broadway this winter, Bostnar, who recently married a local high school teacher, is at home in Peterborough memorizing her lines. “The way I learn lines is to get them to make sense to me. As I’m going through them, I keep hearing Carmen,” she said.

Bostnar plans to be “off book” by the time rehearsals start because the Players only have 10 days to put each show together. Such are the perils of traditional summer stock. Bostnar will also appear in a small role in Lettice and Lovage and in Gus Kaikkonen’s new play, Solidarity.

Bostnar has some advice for the Peterborough Players audience about Grace & Glorie. She says, “Sit there and enjoy the ride. Any chance you get to see Carmen Decker, don’t pass it up.”