MET puts on a dark comedy about teens for grown-ups
It’s impolite to guess an actress’s age, but Kimberly Akimbo, now enjoying an effective shoestring production at Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, invites — hell, demands — that we do so.
Nancy Marcy, who strikes me as about 60, stars as a teenager. She glimmers sadly in the title role, an awkward high-schooler whose body ages at four times the normal rate, thanks to one of those diseases created to make a point in jagged comedies like this one. Marcy wears cutesy T-shirts and form-fitting jeans. She’s a touch stylish and a touch pathetic, just like real-life teenagers.
Her Kimberly is shy but also goofy, willful and eager to share with someone — anyone — about the life that boils within her. Marcy is so certain in her command over teen psychology that within 10 minutes, the show’s high-concept casting no longer feels like a stunt. Instead, it’s a wicked and sometimes tender exploration of adolescence and old age and how, if we’re lucky, the same hearts beat within us during both.
Director Robert Paisley catches a gentle tingling in the romantic moments that Marcy shares with Sam Cordes, a promising young actor who looks like he just hit his twenties last week. Because Cordes plays a high-schooler, too, there’s also a danger here that playfully touches on one of our strongest taboos.
Complicating matters further: Kimberly’s life expectancy is 16. As the show opens, her dreaded birthday is approaching.
So the show is poignant and risque. It’s also often hilarious. Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (author of the Unicorn’s recent, excellent Rabbit Hole) whets the edges of Kimberly’s world until they’re serrated.
Kimberly endures a nightmarish family life. Her mother (Jan Chapman) is a shrill and helpless hypochondriac; her dad, played with raw-eyed misery by Scott Cordes, is a gruff boozer who can’t keep a promise. He also insists that Dungeons & Dragons, which Kimberly plays with Jeff (the younger Cordes’ character), will lead her to hell. Lindsay-Abaire clearly shows that both parents are coping with all that life has thrown at them, and he allows them moments of grace. Also, a crowd-pleasing Missy Koonce larks through as a homeless aunt predisposed to ill-advised criminal adventures; her attempts to rope Kimberly and Jeff into a check-forging scheme drive much of the story.
Lindsay-Abaire’s jokes have teeth, and his characters are forever coining useful new insults and profanity. That said, the mixture of broad comic cruelty and emphatic bigheartedness occasionally verges into Married With Children territory. Frustrated, Kimberly’s father complains, “I’m like the guy on the hill, pushing the rock.”
Kimberly shoots back, “Was he drunk, too?”
A long run of gags involving a swear jar — the fund to which family members must contribute a nickel each time they curse — is familiar from The Simpsons. But it ultimately transcends its TV roots, suggesting Kimberly’s youthful hope that her awful family might be improved, and providing a witty indication of how much time has passed between scenes.
Director Paisley is sensitive to Lindsay-Abaire’s shifting tones, and his cast treats both the broad and the lifelike with dignity.
Much of Kimberly Akimbo stands with the MET’s best productions, with the cast, director and author delivering those moments of theater in which it’s possible to lose all sense of the real world. Here, only the design team works against that unison: The set is a horror, all odd-angled yellow flats dabbed over with black lines and patterns probably meant to evoke Kandinsky but instead looking pinched from some Nickelodeon game show. Worse, it needs to be rearranged every couple of minutes to keep up with Lindsay-Abaire’s frequent scene changes. By the end, I knew the faces of the hardworking crew almost as well as those of the actors. But the sellout crowd didn’t care — they clapped right through the blackouts, eager for the next full moment.
One more word about Robert Paisley: He’s an accomplished actor in his own right, and I look forward to catching him next week in The Event, an acclaimed one-man show that John Clancy wrote and performed for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and which plays for three nights only at MET.
