AGING GRACELESSLY

A superb cast can’t keep David Lindsay-Abaire’s
dark comedy from showing its age in a
production that never finds its pulse

Kimberly (Dey Young) and Buddy (Bradley Holzer)

There’s a very good reason Kimberly Akimbo became a better musical than it is a play. David Lindsay-Abaire’s original dark comedy, now revived by Theatre Palisades at the Odyssey Theatre, has a terrific premise: Kimberly is turning 16, but a rare genetic condition causes her to age at roughly four times the normal rate, leaving her in the body of a woman in her seventies and with precious little time remaining. Yet the play, which premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2001, treats that potentially devastating situation in an episodic, sitcom-like fashion that hasn’t aged particularly well. At nearly two and a half hours, this production only makes the shortcomings more apparent.

Anyone who knows the Tony-winning musical that Lindsay-Abaire later created with composer Jeanine Tesori may be surprised by how much more satisfying the material eventually became. The pair didn’t merely add songs; they went back under the hood. Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire saw that these characters had complicated inner lives that weren’t necessarily visible from the outside—the very discrepancy that gives a musical reason to sing. Lindsay-Abaire has acknowledged that the musical gave him an opportunity to improve portions of the original he was unhappy with, while he and Tesori approached the adults with greater empathy than he had when writing the play. The result is a more sympathetic Kimberly and, crucially, a better understanding of why a family facing the imminent death of a child might behave as irrationally and selfishly as this one does. What music and hindsight ultimately supplied was connective tissue: the oddball family became painfully human, and Kimberly’s determination to grab whatever life she could became genuinely moving.

Here, poor Kimberly (Dey Young) is surrounded by people so consumed with their own troubles that her impending death can feel like an afterthought. Her pregnant mother, Pattie (Abigail Stewart), is a hypochondriac recovering from carpal tunnel surgery, with both hands and wrists in casts; her father, Buddy (Bradley Holzer), seeks refuge in alcohol and is spectacularly ill-equipped for parenthood. The fact that these two have gone ahead and created another baby while their daughter is unlikely to survive much beyond adolescence only makes the family dynamic more peculiar. Meanwhile, Kimberly wants what any teenager wants: a little independence, a little romance, and some indication that her life—however accelerated—actually belongs to her.

Kimberly (Dey Young) and Jeff (Zakary Risinger)

That possibility arrives in the sweetly awkward form of Jeff (Zakary Risinger), a classmate and fellow outsider whose fondness for anagrams turns into a fondness for Kimberly. Then Kimberly’s butch, troublemaking, ne’er-do-well Aunt Debra (Sallie Eskins) blows through the door. Formerly incarcerated, currently homeless, and apparently constitutionally incapable of passing up a scam, Debra recruits Kimberly and Jeff into her latest criminal enterprise. Kimberly is surprisingly willing to help: the money offers her a chance to get away and finally do something she wants to do while she still can.

And therein lies one of the problems with the play: it takes forever to get there. The family dysfunction keeps circling back on itself, reiterating troubles we understood the first or second time around. Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori wisely excised much of this repetition when adapting the work into a musical and gave the story more forward motion. The original instead keeps returning to its comic eccentricities until what once seemed quirky and funny—like some of Christopher Durang’s early works—begins to feel stale.

Debra (Sallie Eskins) and Kimberly (Dey Young)

That problem is compounded here by Cate Caplin’s surprisingly uninspired direction. I say surprisingly because I’ve admired her work elsewhere, particularly An Inspector Calls and You Can’t Take It with You, productions in which her creative juices seemed fully engaged. Granted, those are infinitely better-written plays, but here the evening simply sits there. In the Odyssey’s intimate space, it needs to move much faster. Scenes need to be brought downstage more often, relationships need greater physical and emotional definition, and comic beats need to land before the next one arrives. Instead, beats routinely go missing, blackouts come abruptly, and scenes often end without enough punctuation to elicit applause.

This is especially frustrating because Caplin has cast the play spectacularly well. Every actor seems uncannily right for the role. Young finds Kimberly’s adolescent spirit without resorting to an elderly actress doing a teenage impersonation; she gives us a girl whose body and chronology simply refuse to agree. Stewart commits wholeheartedly to Pattie’s astonishing self-absorption, while Holzer finds the wounded, inadequate man beneath Buddy’s booziness. Eskins tears into Debra’s brazen criminality without losing the strange affection that makes Kimberly willing to follow her, and Risinger gives Jeff an appealing awkwardness that makes his connection with Kimberly credible rather than merely cute.

 Buddy (Bradley Holzer), Pattie (Abigail Stewart) and Kimberly (Dey Young)

I loved watching these actors. I just kept they had the rhythm and underlying history that could make them work together as a family. We sense too little backstory beneath the behavior. These people arrive as vividly cast characters, but too often they remain isolated comic constructions rather than members of a family that has presumably spent years coping—badly—with the knowledge that Kimberly is going to die.

And boy oh boy, I can only imagine the funny business we could have had from Stewart’s Pattie when, both hands in casts and hugely pregnant, she goes into labor, all the while convinced she has cancer, which she doesn’t—the moment screams for an I Love Lucy treatment. Then there’s the drive-thru scene, where Buddy and Kimberly pick up fast food from Jeff, who, while handing over their order, asks Kimberly if he can write about her disease for a class assignment. Buddy, meanwhile, completely misreads the situation and becomes furious, thinking Jeff is hitting on his daughter. Between Buddy fumbling for money and Kimberly and Jeff talking over him, you can practically hear the comic possibilities begging to be played. These situations should be riotous. Here, much of that potential simply goes untapped. We should be laughing through our shock.

Kimberly (Dey Young), Buddy (Bradley Holzer) and Jeff (Zakary Risinger)

Visually, the production has the same curious split personality. Michael Mullen’s costumes are pitch-perfect, helping define each character without announcing themselves. Sherman Wayne‘s set does enough to establish time and place, yet somehow looks rather good and rather cheap at once. Delightfully cartoonish black-and-white projections by Nick Santiago emphasize Kimberly’s youth, but when they begin moving—particularly during the car sequences—the effect resembles a Flintstones background in which the same tree keeps cycling past (which would have been humorous had the cast been in on the joke). Even the mailbox Debra steals and brings home looks as though it has escaped from Nickelodeon (props by Maria O’Connor). That heightened visual vocabulary could work perfectly well with Lindsay-Abaire’s deliberately skewed world; the problem is that Caplin never quite finds a theatrical language to unite it. And, yes, she certainly has her hands tied with this script.

This production, unfortunately, exposes rather than disguises the original play’s unthreading seams. There is an affecting story buried inside Kimberly Akimbo about a 16-year-old who knows there may be no “later” and therefore has to figure out how to live now. There is also a terrific cast on the Odyssey stage ready to tell it. But the evening never breathes, never gathers momentum, never takes off. It just sits there—and for a girl whose clock is running four times faster than everyone else’s, that may be the cruelest irony of all.

Kimberly (Dey Young)

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photos by Nicola Buck

Kimberly Akimbo
Theatre Palisades
Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. in Los Angeles
Fri–Sat at 7:30; Sun at 2
ends on August 30, 2026
2 hours and 30 minutes, including intermission
for tickets ($25; $22 students), call 310.454.1970 or visit Theatre Palisades
free onsite parking

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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