About the Play:

Kimberly Akimbo is a full-length comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire. "Can we just be normal for a few minutes?," the title character Kimberly asks in this dark hysterical comedy about teenage girl suffering from a freak disease that ages her abnormally. Contending with a family that gives new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," Kimberly must find a way to give meaning to her life and live it to the fullest.

Kimberly Akimbo is a dark comedy with twists and turns about a very adolescent, eye rolling, deeply sighing teenage girl who suffers from progeria, a disease that causes its victims to age more than four times faster than the normal rate. Though she is only 16, she has the face and body of a woman approaching middle age, and she must face a sharply truncated lifespan, but that doesn't garner her attention from her mom, too busy making up her own illnesses to pay attention to her daughter. Her one wish is for a normal family. With uncanny skill and quirky wit, David Lindsay-Abaire uses the disease to explore issues of mortality and denial. When Kimberly and her family flee suburban Secaucus, New Jersey under dubious circumstances, she is forced to reevaluate her life while contending with a selfish, pregnant hypochondriac mother, an immature rarely sober father, a scam-artist aunt pushing a nefarious scheme, her own mortality and, most terrifying of all, the possibility of first love with her socially-challenged classmate. Kimberly Akimbo is relevant to today's issues regarding accepting people who are different than us and the challenges neglected children must navigate to survive in an increasingly preoccupied world, while casting an often humorous light on the inevitable experiences of teenage angst, mid-life crisis and our inescapable mortality. One can't fail to be moved when Kimberly realizes that her time might be ending just as life is beginning for her peers.

Kimberly Akimbo premiered in 2001 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California and received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Playwriting, three Garland Awards and the 2001 Kesselring Prize. Since then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across the US, including its New York City premiere in 2003 at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage, and has been mounted by high schools, colleges, and community theatres.

Cast: 3 women, 2 men

What people say:

"The Comedy of the Year. A haunting and hilarious new play. Mr. Lindsay-Abaire is an expert at tweaking, skewing and finally inverting established formulas. His plays tend to slide right out of predetermined pigeonholes. Kimberly Akimbo is at once a shrewd satire, a black comedy and a heartbreaking study of how time wounds everyone." — New York Times

"David Lindsay-Abaire has crafted a drama that's not just a departure but a revelation — an intensely emotional examination of grief, laced with wit, insightfulness, compassion and searing honesty." — Variety

"A zany, disturbing and strangely affecting comedy. It's a bit of youthful happiness unlike any other." — Associated Press

"I was bowled over by the singular theatricality of David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly Akimbo. The way this harrowing and hilarious work continuously shifts from satire to black comedy to realism could never work anywhere else…theatre at its most original." — NY 1

"A wacky, touching and totally charming dark comedy that gives a whole new meaning to 'coming of age story'." — New York Daily News

"A breezy, foulmouthed, fleet-footed, warmhearted comedy. There have been many dark comedies about dysfunctional families, but this is one of the funniest." — Los Angeles Times

About the Playwright:

David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright, lyricist, librettist and screenwriter. He is the author of Rabbit Hole, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His other theatre works include Good People, Fuddy Meers, and Kimberly Akimbo. He is Co-Chair of the Juilliard School's Playwriting Program.