It’s 1973. The weathered clapboard walls of Grey Gardens, a society family’s home in the exclusive East Hamptons fill the small stage at Vintage Theater.

In a brief prologue, the audience hears scuffling. Binoculars peer out the windows, while a shrill voice is heard. A missing record is found and disoriented, frail-looking Big Edie (Deborah Persoff) emerges and sits, talking about the cats (there were 52 strays and a few raccoons found in the house when authorities finally intervened).

Switch to 1941 and walls of the cleverly-designed set by Peggy Morgan-Stenmark are opened to reveal a classy parlor with grand piano.

Its the day of young Edie Bouvier’s engagement party and her overpowering mother Edith (Megan Van de Hay) is preparing one of her dreaded vocal recitals with help from hard-drinking “permanent pianist” George Gould Strong (Craig Bond, who also ably directed this regional premier).

The girl is to marry Joseph Patrick Kennedy (James O’Hagen Murphy) — yes those Kennedys — who is already being groomed for national office by his father. All is not well in this mother-daughter relationship as Edith implies that her daughter, portrayed by Maggie Sczekan, has behaved badly, which might cause problems for an ambitious politician.

Also on the scene are forceful grandfather Major Bouvier (Ken Street) and young cousins Jacqueline “Jackie” Bouvier (Ellie Schwartz) and Lee Bouvier (Isabelle Sabbah). He advises the girls to “Keep your eyes on the bal l— marry well” and shows his disapproval of Edith’s gay friend Gould, while commenting that her husband has an apartment and mistress in the city. Walls close and Act I ends. We imagine a disastrous party.

As Act II begins, the accomplished Van de Hay, who really owns this production, sings of her “Revolutionary Costume for Today,” as her once-chic outfit is held together with safety pins and she sports a strange scarf-like headgear. Persoff as Big Edie looks even more disheveled and spend most of Act II in her bed upstairs. The once-elaborate parlor is strewn with cat food cans and litter.

While you can’t actually smell it, one certainly wrinkles the nose and withdraws emotionally from this pair. Murphy reappears here as Jerry, who tries to help them, although it seems impossible. Tom Auclair plays Brooks, the servant in 1941 and his son, Brooks Jr., the gardener, in 1971.

Conversations are in song at times in this striking work by Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, which is based on a documentary about the two dysfunctional elderly women, relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, found living amidst cats and refuse at a formerly exclusive address.

Vintage Theatre is to be congratulated for mounting the first Denver production of a difficult and striking theatrical work.

Try to see it before June 12.