YOUNGSTOWN — Ramona King’s “Steal Away” isn’t referred to as a comedy or even a play. It’s a folk tale.

Folk tales tend to be passed down by being told rather than written down, and those stories often get embellished by each storyteller.

Hopewell Theatre tells it hilariously.

There’s a serious message in King’s script, but it’s not heavy handed in its approach. Except for one speech that lays it out explicitly, the emphasis stays on the humor as a group of church ladies who know each other’s flaws and foibles all too well try to work together on a mission that’s way outside their comfort zones.

Set in Chicago during the Great Depression, the members of the Negro Women’s Organization for Youth Education created a scholarship program to send young women to college that’s funded primarily through the sale of pies. Those pies aren’t selling like they used to with everyone struggling financially.

They gather together to celebrate Tracyada (Dezarye Inez Powell), their latest scholarship graduate, but one of the things she learned at college is that the system is rigged against them. The promises of the Constitution and the Reconstruction and other government policies haven’t panned out. Reparations must be taken because they aren’t being handed out.

She suggests a bank burglary, which would give them a much bigger piece of the pie to fund those scholarships. And with bank robbers like John Dillinger dominating the headlines, who is going to suspect a group of church ladies?

The older women are appalled and would rather pursue the more acceptable route of a bank loan. They take Tracyada’s proposal more seriously when their loan is rejected by a racist bank manager who tells them, “Colored girls don’t need no education.”

From there “Steal Away” leans into many of the tropes in stories about novice criminals preparing for a heist, with a brief detour into “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” territory in the second act.

Director Carla D Gipson does double duty by also playing Redd, one of the church ladies, along with Ramona S. Austin (Jade), Lois E. Thornton (Sudy), Joy L. Smith (Stella) and Monica Beasley-Martin (Blu).

Some are local stage veterans, others are novices, but Gipson has them working like a true ensemble. For most of the play, all six women are on stage together, and the banter and interplay among them feels natural. They know how to deliver a punchline, and how to react in order to amplify the laugh.

At times the broad comedy seems to conflict with the more serious undercurrent of the story, but the approach of Gipson and the cast seem to balance the tonal shifts as well as possible.

It’s great fun watching veterans Gipson and Beasley-Martin face off as if they’re gunslingers in an old western and seeing Thornton’s Sudy transition into a take-charge leader as the plan unfolds.

It all plays out on a realistic set designed by Martin Charles that is decorated with pieces that convincingly capture its period setting, as do the costumes by Gipson. And the second act costumes the women wear for heist had me thinking, if this was written by Quentin Tarantino instead of Ramona King, it might be called “Rectory Dolls.”