E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bittersweet 16 BTW maps the weird world of Kimberly Akimbo BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Kimberly Akimbo By David Lindsay-Abaire. Directed by Jason Southerland. Set and lighting by Caleb Wertenbaker. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound by Fay Gerbes. With Amy Barry, Marc Carver, Jacob Liberman, Judith McIntyre, and Elizabeth Anne Quincy. Presented by Boston Theatre Works at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through May 16.

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo is a coming-of-age story with a surreal spin. As with the warped, liquidy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, time is totally distorted for Kimberly (Judith McIntyre). She’s 16 years old by the calendar, but because of a rare disease, a fictional affliction the playwright based on progeria, her body ages four and a half times more quickly than is normal. Normal is what she tries to be; unfortunately, the physical and social effects of her condition combine with regularly drunk dad Buddy, a Chevron-station attendant, and very pregnant foul-mouthed mom Pattie, a terminal hypochondriac supposedly dying of cancer while suffering from carpal-tunnel syndrome and diabetes, to make Kim’s pleas for "just five minutes" of family function futile. She’s forever just trying not to drown in a sea of "freaks."

Kimberly premiered at South Coast Rep in 2001 and ran the following year at Manhattan Theater Club, where Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers had debuted. This ferociously funny yet tender production by Boston Theatre Works, the play’s New England premiere, evokes the working-class heroes celebrated in Roseanne, the venomous marriage detailed by Edward Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the teenage wastelands rendered in the brat-pack films of the 1980s, and the bizarre universes of obsessive, unhinged, self-centered schemers who bare their souls on daytime TV talk shows. The last should not be the least bit surprising — after all, this is New Jersey, where mom has spent 16 years working the cream gun at the Sunshine Cupcake Factory, Frosted Flakes pass for dinner, and dads bribe daughters with promised trips to Six Flags amusement parks.

The Promised Land it’s not. In fact, Bagoda, to which the family have suddenly relocated from Secaucus, isn’t the sort of place Buddy intended to raise kids he never imagined having. Well-intentioned but spineless, Mark Carver’s pathetic Buddy makes that confession to a tape recorder that the wickedly comic, high-strung Pattie (Amy Barry) often clutches in her bandaged hands. She’s making a tape so her unborn child will have the real dish on the family after she’s dead. Having mom so focused on her own mortality is Lindsay-Abaire’s way of throwing the bitterly ironic punch that has become a staple of so much contemporary comedy. Here, however, it waters down an otherwise meaty stew. Pattie’s narcissistic fixation on her imagined doom is too blatant a contrast to the way in which her daughter hurries to stock up on life experiences, first love being paramount, and evade her fast-approaching fate.

Some unlikely characters provide Kim with peepholes into normality simply by the way they treat her. Among these is her Aunt Debra (a subversive, smutty Elizabeth Anne Quincy), a crass ex-con and vagabond with a money-laundering scheme for she needs her niece’s help. Debra’s arrival sheds light on why the family have fled Secaucus. It’s obvious that the reasons are central to the dysfunction we see, but making them a mystery feels like tangential dramatic fuss. That’s because Lindsay-Abaire’s skill lies in creating portrait galleries of dynamic characters rather than in constructing plot. Enough tension fizzes within Kimberly alone to make us comprehend the urgency caused by time-elapsed life; we hardly need the subplots. In the role, McIntyre is at once spunky and terrified, forceful and frail. Like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, she conveys the aging process with a commanding physical presence. Her Kimberly adopts a pigeon-toed stance, and she unleashes a hilarious squirming number when her dad humiliates her by accusing her friend of having hormone-fueled intentions.

That brings us to Jeff (an adorably awkward Jacob Liberman), a classmate with a vicious geek streak (read: an outcast). Two outsiders finding solace in each another is as cliché’d as "once upon a time," but there are enough quirky tilts here to save this pair from schmaltz. The rescue can also be credited to Jason Southerland, whose direction brings out a Mamet-esque rat-tat-tat rhythm in the dialogue.

There are several messages the playwright seems to be communicating via his kooky crew of misfits. It’s clear he wants to demonstrate, through Kimberly, how quickly the elderly are marginalized and how families plan their futures without them before they’re gone. There’s also the whimsical carpe diem memo. But the moments of moralizing are so rare that they don’t dim the tempered absurdity that marks Lindsay-Abaire’s timely maturation as a playwright.