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By Michael Morain

In a review of the play “Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End,” it’s tempting to simply fill up the next few paragraphs with with quotes from her beloved housekeeping column. There’s just so much good material.

“Never trust a doctor whose office plants have died.”

“If you want to get rid of stinking odors in your kitchen, just stop cooking.”

“Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they’ll think that’s all you’ve done since graduation.”

That must have been tempting for the playwrights, too. But somehow, Allison Engel and her twin sister, Margaret Engel, managed to distill three decades of Bombeck’s syndicated columns and bestselling books into a tight, bright, one-hour, one-woman show that captures her wit, warmth and tell-it-like-it-is honesty.

In the current production, which Des Moines Performing Arts opened Tuesday and continues through Dec. 21 at the Temple Theater, the charming actor Pam Sherman delivers so many of those famous lines as if they just occurred to her while she is folding laundry or click-clacking away on the typewriter she sets on an ironing board in the bedroom she shares with her husband, Bill. She just chatters away, as if talking to a friend, as if her columns had suddenly sprung to life and slipped on a housedress and cardigan.

In the process, a portrait emerges of a famously ordinary woman who lived through an extraordinary chapter of the 20th century, as a child in the Great Depression, a young mother in the baby boom — “the biggest, boomiest boom in history” — and an undersung champion of women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1960s and ’70s.

As she put it, “I was blazing a trail all right, but it only led from the laundry room to the sink.”

But, of course, that’s an understatement. Even though her 4,000-some columns for 900 newspapers covered a beat that “started at the crabgrass in the front yard and ended at the back porch,” she mowed a path for other women in media to follow. She articulated the everyday thoughts and loftier, often deferred dreams of a whole generation of women in an era before folks could share such musings on social media. And she just kept at it, churning out columns until a few days before she died, in 1996.

The list of writers who followed Bombeck’s lead includes both of the Engel twins, whose distinguished careers started with stints at the Des Moines Register and Tribune. During a Q&A after Tuesday’s show, they explained that one of Bombeck’s sons had invited them to write the script after seeing a Los Angeles production of their earlier play, “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” starring Kathleen Turner. The Engels jumped at the Bombeck offer, partly because their own mother was one of her biggest fans. The sisters pored over her columns and visited her husband, who showed them family photos and her trusty old typewriter. (For more of the back story, check out Peggy Engel’s lively conversation earlier this week with Julie Gammack, another longtime columnist.)

The results of the Engels’ teamwork premiered in Washington, D.C., in 2015 and has been produced some 80 times across the country in the years since. But it’s hard to imagine a better version than the one that’s here in town for the next few weeks. By the end of opening night, the audience seemed to agree with what Bombeck sputtered at the very beginning: “Oh, gosh – it’s really wonderful to be here.”