at the Victory Theatre Center
As in real life, theatre allows comedy and tragedy equal time; playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is helping to keep that equation balanced. The writer with the dirty mouth has plenty to chew on in this family drama-farce-comedy about the quirky logistics of a blue-collar family out of its depths in society's shallows. If there is a grand plan, the Lavaco family has been badly shortchanged during the design process.
Kimberly, played with marvelous wit and style by Judy Jean Berns, is afflicted with a rare disease that ages her physically at four and a half times normal growth rate. At 16, still a teenager, she has reached her life expectancy. Her hyperdysfunctional family, swaddled in secrets and emotional immaturity, skewers its burden with an upside-down nonlogic. Her mother (Kathleen Bailey in a hugely funny turn), in nascent motherhood with a "normal" child, is the foulmouthed cheerleader at this game she doesn't understand. With restraining mitts on her hands, a leg brace, imminent labor pains, and innumerable psychosomatic disorders, her neediness is the crazy glue that's keeping the family together—for now.
Joe O'Connor is bloody marvelous as the patriarch manqué, a cheerfully narrow-minded drunk whose heart is pure but who can't remember his own promises. Patrick Rogers is cleanly sweet as Kimberly's nerdy contemporary whose own desperate family life instructs his behavior toward her family life. Topping the game in this icon-breaking cast is Sharon Johnston in a hilarious take on the black sheep of the family, an ex-con who's definitely headed back to the slammer for crazily outrageous bending of the law.
Whether this is farce or insanity might be settled by calling it a family comedy-drama and accepting that if it's Lindsay-Abaire, it must be quirky. It also must be crude, scatalogical, foulmouthed, unbelievable, and, characteristically, not about much.
Under Maria Gobetti's vital, race-paced direction, it's all of the above, with the subtraction of "not about much" and the addition of painfully dramatic insight into family politics and the eventual humanity of unawakened souls. Certainly we scream with laughter, but we also weep with recognition and personal hurt.
Presented by and at the Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 4 p.m. Feb. 2-Mar. 25. (818) 841-5421. www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org.
Reviewed by Madeleine Shaner
