Reviewed by Jerry Kraft
David
Lindsay Abaire
is a very clever playwright, bright and imaginative, and he writes theatre that
is inventive, sometimes a bit disorienting, funny, and usually intriguing.
Because he often has a distressingly negative view of family life in general
and familial relationships in particular, his humor tends to be abusive and
darkly hilarious. As with the families themselves, his characters seem inclined
to peculiar pathologies that prevent them from leading "normal"
lives. They lead their lives disabled by maladies both exotic and mundane. Each
seems to find some way to make the lives of the others more difficult, and in
the process to further disappoint themselves.
In
"Kimberly Akimbo" a 16 year old girl is aging at four times the usual
rate, so she appears to us as a 60 plus year old woman. Both Kimberly's father
and mother are (at least in appearance) much younger than their child. Buddy,
her father, drinks and is entombed in his domestic life. Her mother, Pattie, is
a pregnant hypochondriac. They are visited by her aunt Debra, who is a homeless
petty criminal. Kimberly has a potential boyfriend, Jeff, who is a hopeless
nerd with ADHD and a passion for "Dungeons and Dragons". Debra
launches a criminal plan with the collusion of Kimberly and Jeff, which will
entangle everyone in the family and, of course, end badly.
Mr.
Abaire rose to national attention with his widely-produced play "Fuddy
Meers",
about an amnesiac woman and the people who may or may not be her family. He has
since gone on to write for movies and television. Given that range of media,
it's apparent that he fully understands what is unique and uniquely effective
on stage. But equally apparent is that he can be self-consciously clever, at
times gimmicky, and inclined to the sort of sit-com types that are all too
familiar from television. In this play, the purely theatrical device of an
older woman playing a young girl who appears to be an older woman is only
possible with the imaginary puissance of the stage. It also provides a very interesting
technical challenge for an actress; to give us a recognizably youthful
perspective on her unique experience of adulthood as appearance, as artifice.
Abaire's
blend of ironic absurdity and interpersonal dysfunction requires carefully
balanced direction, and David Hsieh doesn't quite pull it off. The comedy never quite goes
out on the edge far enough, and the drama is inconsistent. More critically,
this play really lives or dies on the depth, variety and authenticity of the
actress playing Kimberly, and Diane Felty simply doesn't have the range to make it work.
Where the play demands that we see the literal inner-child generating a persona
in conflict with the woman who appears before us, this performance embodies a
child only because the script says it does. Ms. Felty never fully becomes a
young woman trapped in an old woman's body, nor an old woman who knows the
world through the eyes of youth. That is a shortcoming from which the
production simply cannot recover.
Much
more successful were the other members of Kimberly's family. Roberta Pionski played the mother with a fine
mix of anger, cynicism, self-pity and wounded maternal desperation. With both
hands swathed in bandages for her carpel-tunnel, a cast on one leg, and her
bulging, pregnant belly, she literally carried the miseries of her life wrapped
around her. For all that, she was the one who had at least some fantasy of what
domestic life should be like, however removed from the reality around her. Adam
Sewall is also
quite good as Buddy, a husband and father with no solid concept of either role.
Again, he might like to do the right thing, as in giving up drinking, but it
won't last two weeks. And the relationship between the husband and wife
explains everything about this family. He is condemned to life with her, and
she is resigned to a life without him in any emotional sense. When the
aggressively bad influence of Aunt Debra arrives we know immediately that she
will be the spark that ignites this domestic tinderbox of malignant neglect. Ellen
Dessler is very
effective in creating an uncompromising, amoral and catalytic character.
The
boyfriend, Jeff, is a different and distinct performance problem. Michael
Scott is very
skillful in creating a bumbling, four-eyed, stereotypical nerd, and is often
very, very funny. The problem is that his performance is, first of all, a pure
stereotype, and secondly, too broad for the style of this production.
"Kimberly Akimbo" calls for the creation of a world in which the
bizarre is achieved by small exaggerations, not by cartooning. Mr. Scott would
have been fine for Seymore in "Little Shop of Horrors", but given the
unfortunate limitations of the lead role, and this outsized caricature at the
other end of the spectrum, the play as a whole flies into pieces.
"Kimberly
Akimbo" is an amusing, sometimes overly hard-working play with some
uncommon perspectives on family relationships and aging and what it means to
live maturely. But it is also a surprisingly delicate piece of comic theatre,
and director David Hsieh didn't quite have the finesse to mold all of his
players into a single performance style, to unify the manner of the comedy, or
to earn the moments of genuine compassion. There is good work on display here,
but in the end this production suffers from the same malady as Kimberly
herself, never quite able to understand what it means to be what she is, or
what to do about it.