Bitten by the Bug Again

And the winner of the Line of Dialogue Least Likely to Appear in a World Premiere Award goes to this utterance found in David Lindsay-Abaire’s play “Kimberly Akimbo�: “Dad, I’m like 75, OK?�

In “Kimberly Akimbo,� which had its world premiere Friday at South Coast Repertory, Lindsay-Abaire has concocted a bittersweet fable grounded in a bizarre medical condition. The hook: 16-year-old Kimberly Levaco is afflicted with progeria, a disease that makes her look like a 75-year-old woman. Outwardly a freak, Kimberly turns out to be the most normal member of a dysfunctional family.

In “Kimberly’s� pop-saturated universe, characters play Dungeons & Dragons, suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, pour sugar on their Frosted Flakes, plan check-kiting scams lifted from “PrimeTime Live� and dream of one day visiting the Six Flags theme park.

But the most striking aspect of the piece may be that “Kimberly� is Lindsay-Abaire’s second play in a row to revolve around medical disability. In his 1999 breakthrough, “Fuddy Meers,� one character has a stroke, the other has amnesia. “I can’t do it any more,� says Lindsay-Abaire. “Only because people are like, ‘Oh, he’s the medical condition guy, the Oliver Sacks of the theater world.’ That’s the last thing I want to be--nothing against Oliver Sacks.�

The 31-year-old playwright, talking by phone from his Brooklyn home where he lives with his actress wife, Kristine, and infant son, Nicholas, admits the possibility of being pigeon-holed as a writer specializing in strange diseases “occurred to me before I started writing ‘Kimberly,’ but I just liked the idea so much I couldn’t not do it.�

Inspiration for “Kimberly� came while Lindsay-Abaire was making small talk with an acquaintance. “I asked a friend how his niece was and he said, ‘Oh, she’s amazing: she’s 2 months old going on 80.’ And because my mind is so literal, I immediately pictured this tiny old woman, wise beyond her years, trapped in a baby’s body.�

The image sparked memories of a TV documentary he vaguely remembered seeing as a child. “Progeria is in fact this very sad and rare condition that prematurely ages a child’s body so they look like old people,� he says. “I had no desire to write about the actual disease.

“I was more interested in the metaphorical idea of a teenager trapped in an older person’s body and how that might fit into a parable about mortality and seizing the day and contending with whatever monsters are around us, whether it be family or teen angst, or whatever it is. The disease is the motor of the play--this girl has a very limited time to live--but the disease isn’t what the play is about.�

An Outsider Looking In

“Fuddy Meers� represents its stroke victim character’s attempt to pronounce the phrase “fuzzy mirrors.� The play’s lost-in-a-fun-house motif established Lindsay-Abaire as a playwright to watch. “Fuddy’s� alienated characters include a man who can express his true feelings only when talking to a hand puppet. “Kimberly� opens with a woman so bandaged up she has to turn on a tape recorder with her nose. Tableaux like these have prompted a common question from theatergoers who’ve seen his plays, says Lindsay-Abaire half-jokingly: “People always wonder, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’ �

The truth is, Lindsay-Abaire enjoyed a fairly normal working-class childhood in South Boston. His father was a fruit peddler, his mother a factory worker. At 11, Lindsay-Abaire won a scholarship to Milton Academy, an elite prep school in suburban Boston. He suddenly found himself catapulted out of his blue-collar neighborhood and into a strange new universe. “I think the moment that I determined I would become a writer was probably when I found myself as this outsider trying to make sense of his surroundings,� Lindsay-Abaire remembers. “Kimberly, too, is surrounded by these sort of monstrous figures--she can’t figure them out, can’t understand why she looks the way she does. Everything is kind of skewed and warped, which is the central image in ‘Fuddy Meers’--fun-house mirrors. That childlike vision of a world where everything is so big and bold is something that’s worked its way into my writing.�

In High School, He Was ‘the Funny One’

At Milton, Lindsay-Abaire got his first taste of the limelight when performing in statewide theater competitions. “It’s very strange,� the self-deprecating author recalls. “You do a 10-minute excerpt of a play, all the different characters. In my sophomore year, I did ‘I’m Not Rappaport.’ At 16, playing an old Jewish guy and 70-year-old black man--it was ludicrous.�

Singled out by his classmates as “the funny one,� Lindsay-Abaire wrote a class revue each year of high school. “I’m sure they were terrible awful things and total rip-offs of other people’s plays and we had a cast of 30 so everybody could have a part. But it was great fun, and that’s how it started.�

Lindsay-Abaire studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College, graduated in 1992, found a day job at a New York dance company and kept writing. In 1996, he won a scholarship to Juilliard’s playwright program, overseen by Christopher Durang and Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman (“ ‘night, Mother�). “Chris and Marsha had a whole lifetime of experience and it was just the greatest thing to sit around and listen to their theater stories. They spoke to us and it was from one playwright to another and that was very empowering.�

Before, during and after Juilliard, Lindsay-Abaire produced a succession of plays showcasing his delicately balanced absurdist sensibility. Even now, Lindsay-Abaire says, some actors don’t quite get it. “There are actors who come in to audition and say, ‘Oh, I know what this is, it’s a really silly comedy’ and they do it as if it’s Feydeau. And then other people will say, ‘Oh well, it seems to be funny but really it’s this angst-y Sam Shepard-y play’ and they’ll give us a reading from ‘Medea,’ and that’s also wrong. So finding the actor that can do this sort of thing is really hard.�

Marylouise Burke, who plays the title role in “Kimberly,� turned out to be exactly on Lindsay-Abaire’s wavelength. In 1997, she appeared in her first Lindsay-Abaire play, “The Devil Inside.� “My character ran a Laundromat,� Burke recalls. “When her son turns 21, she tries to get him to avenge the death of her father. He’d been murdered walking to the Poconos and all that she had left of him was his foot, which she kept in a jar. I ended up killing one of the characters by pushing him into the dryer.

“I was besotted with David’s writing,� she says. “I love the fact that he combines contradictory elements, that something can be heartbreaking and wildly funny at the same time.� A self-described late bloomer, the fiftysomething actress enjoyed her first prominent notices in 1999 when she starred in “Fuddy Meers.�

Months before “Fuddy Meers� bowed in New York, South Coast Repertory artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson had gotten hold of the script. “We read approaching 1,000 manuscripts each year,� Emmes says. “Only on occasion does a really unique voice emerge, and that clearly was the case with David.� Emmes and Benson met with Lindsay-Abaire in New York in the spring of 1999 and commissioned him to write something for SCR. When “Kimberly Akimbo� arrived early last year, Emmes recounts, “We were tremendously excited. We were delighted by how touching and funny it was and immediately knew we wanted to produce it.�

“Kimberly� received a staged reading at SCR’s Pacific Playwrights Festival last June and workshopped later that summer at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. For the play’s first full production at SCR, Lindsay-Abaire re-teamed with “Fuddy Meers� director David Petrarca, who’d made his mark in New York helming the AIDS dramedy “Marvin’s Room.� Says Lindsay-Abaire, “David works hard at really grounding the comedy and telling the actors, ‘Don’t worry about the jokes, the jokes will come, the jokes will rise, let’s just play the stakes. Let me know what’s really going on here and forget about whether the audience will laugh or not.’ �

Dealing With Family Dynamics

One thing is certain. Lindsay-Abaire isn’t looking for the sympathy vote. The last thing he wants, he says, is for audience members to feel sorry for Kimberly. But her circumstances are, in fact, quite desperate.

“Kimberly is in this household of narcissists,� says Lindsay-Abaire. “They can barely face the reality of their own lives, let alone the seriousness of their daughter’s condition. So Kimberly has this struggle of needing to be noticed at home. She’s trying to construct this world, doing everything in her power to make her parents normal, to make herself normal too: ‘Can’t we talk about what kind of day I had at school, Mom?’ And her mom goes, ‘Oh, you know I’m just not good at that.’ The only thing her mother is good at is talking about herself, which is where her hypochondria comes from, because if she puts all this attention on herself, if she thinks, ‘My problems are much bigger than my daughter’s problems because I’m the one who’s dying,’ then she won’t have to deal with Kimberly. It’s funny, but it’s not funny.

“As crazy as it seems, it’s really not so far off from the way people actually deal with problems in a family--to deny that they exist.�

Lindsay-Abaire seems so tuned in to the way families implode, fracture and realign, one feels compelled to ask one more time about his own roots. “My parents are supportive and wonderful and very proud and all that. They don’t quite understand the theater stuff. In the play, the mom says about Kimberly, ‘I don’t know where she got that filthy mouth,’ and of course this mother has been cursing through the whole play. It’s very telling because it was the exact scene I had had with my dad. He recently saw the Boston production of ‘Fuddy Meers’ and he commented on the swearing and I said, ‘Well, where do you think I got ‘em?’ �

A New Treatment for Next Play

Besides handling last-minute rewrites on “Kimberly Akimbo,� Lindsay-Abaire is working on a new play for Janeane Garofalo, writing an animated feature film for Fox and polishing “Wonder of the World,� which will star Sarah Jessica Parker when it opens in the fall in New York.

“It’s about a woman who leaves her husband suddenly for mysterious reason, hops a bus to Niagara Falls and befriends a suicidal alcoholic with a giant pickle barrel about to go over the falls. It’s a play about discovery . . . that sounds so generic,� Lindsay-Abaire critiques himself, then proceeds, “Oh, who cares what it’s thematically about? It’s a lady who goes to Niagara Falls and gets into all sorts of trouble.� And there’s not a doctor in sight.

* “Kimberly Akimbo� at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 708-5555. Opens April 13. Regular schedule: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends May 13. $28 to $49.