imberly Levaco, like all young women approaching 16, has one foot in a deeply personal search for independence and the other in an overwhelming struggle for social acceptance.

At odds with her body, embarrassed by her family and ignored by the other kids at school, she seems to have nothing more than a grocery list of typical teen problems, exacerbated when her parents completely forget her 16th birthday.

If you walk away from David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo” a little disappointed, it will have nothing to do with Salt Lake Acting Company’s crowd-pleasing production. In addition to the excellent cast, Keven Myhre’s direction and set design handle the script with the appropriate mix of playfulness (the set is literally a visual game reflecting one of the play’s key scenes), and constrained emotion.

The play works along these lines: First, take your average all-American teen melodrama (they’re lying around all over the place, a la “Sixteen Candles”), then skew it, not to the point of being unrecognizable, just bizarre.

Next, reincorporate all the stock characters of dysfunction we’ve come to expect, even demand, from the genre, but raise the stakes for them. Add humor, heavy on the rapid-fire one-liners, sitcom style.

Then, end it all with a startlingly average development, which is only surprising given the circumstances, to remind the audience how “normal” the plot was all along—sort of. It’s a working formula for a good dark comedy.

So, let me start again. At odds with her body—that of a woman in her mid-’60s—Kimberly is dealing with the rare disease progeria, causing her body to age approximately four times faster than average.

Life expectancy for someone with progeria is about 16 years, so that when Kimberly’s parents forget her birthday, it’s more likely to be out of willed repression of its significance than the sort of absentmindedness caused by the hustle and bustle of more important events, as the tortured teen story usually goes.

Kimberly’s embarrassing family consists of Pattie, her neurotically self-obsessed mother whose hypochondria allows her to ignore her daughter’s disease, an alcoholic simpleton of a father (who could only be named Buddy), whose absence allows him some degree of escape from the life he views as a failure—however average that failure may be—and Debra, the charismatically deranged criminal aunt who stalks the rest of them from town to town in between prison sentences.

To some degree, audiences are now on familiar ground watching the drama of the dysfunctional family, which has been raised to an art form in its various incarnations on screen, culminating in gems like Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

But in the context of Lindsay-Abaire’s script, underlying all the laughter produced by the dysfunction—and there is plenty of laughter produced—is a tension caused by the audience’s knowledge that it is laughing at various normal individuals psychologically flailing toward a feasible response to the strain of living day-to-day under such uncommon circumstances.

“Kimberly Akimbo” received the L.A. Drama Critics’ Circle Award for playwriting, three Garland Awards, and the 2001 Kesselring Prize.

The title refers to an anagram of Kimberly’s name worked out by Jeff, the earnest boy-next-door type who approaches her through his biology class assignment to research a disease. He explains to Kimberly that an anagram is a rearrangement of the letters of one phrase to form another phrase, and that ‘akimbo’ means bent, or skewed. This scene nicely brings to the fore Lindsay-Abaire’s concern in portraying a family rearranging itself in order to adjust to the peculiar shape that Kimberly’s illness imposes.

SLAC’s production is full of the kind of hilarious moments that leave you quoting lines in the car on your way home.

The performances are superb all around. When Colleen Baum steals the show as Pattie, it’s because she deftly handles the lines given her—virtually all the best lines in the script—with minimum exaggeration. She maintains the realism of her character’s desperation so that the belly laughs she sets off don’t drown out the empathy, which she lets come naturally to the audience.

But the script itself seems to bite off more tension than it ever tries to chew. By the end, Kimberly’s disease seems less a defining factor as the source of the darkness for the comedy and more a vehicle for its absurdity.

All that absurdity is ultimately left, like Kimberly and Jeff at the play’s close, driving in no particular direction. Hey, at least the trip was a lot of fun.

“Kimberly Akimbo” runs through Oct.. 19 at the Salt Lake Acting Company. Tickets can be purchased by phone at 363-SLAC.
rachael@red-mag.com