A satiric sensibility has to be funny first.
David Lindsay- Abaire, whose latest play, “Kimberly Akimbo,” follows his “Fuddy Meers” and “Wonder of the World” at the Manhattan Theatre Club, lacks funniness. Instead, he goes heavy on kooky.
In a New Jersey town, Kimberly is a 16-year-old whose body is aging unnaturally fast. Now physically 70, she will soon die.
She is, however, a piece of moral perfection.
She is shyly attracted to Jeff, a weird but bright fellow high-schooler who works in a local Zippy Burger and makes anagrams from people’s names (Kimberly’s aunt, Debra Watts, becomes Basted Wart or Wasted Brat or Wet Bastard).
Kimberly’s parents, on the other hand, are Buddy, a father who drinks too much, and Pattie, a shrill mother with carpal tunnel syndrome, an advanced pregnancy and a relentlessly vile mouth. Pattie will break water on stage and suffer other problems off stage.
A streak of misogyny seems to run through Lindsay-Abaire.
The play is set by designer Robert Brill in an enlarged doll’s house and the school library, and it’s snowing outside – in April – just in case you didn’t know this is a topsy-turvy universe.
The two teenagers (the mature Marylouise Burke and the youthful John Gallagher Jr.) are sweet and sane; the two parents (the good Jake Weber and the annoying Jodie Markell) are irresponsible, adolescent screwballs.
Oh, and I forgot Kimberly’s aunt Debra (a tiresome Ana Gasteyer), a homeless person, a raucous wiseacre, a lesbian and a thief, all at once.
Debra ought to be funny, but she isn’t. She’s just boring.
David Petrarca directs the whole mess in an obvious way.
Just before the end, a revelation of a murder committed by Debra, Buddy and Pattie shocks and further ages Kimberly.
What happens next isn’t clear and I didn’t care, because Lindsay-Abaire never establishes toward his bizarre material anything but a generalized contempt.