Kyle Kellams: Parents sometimes take note that children grow up too fast. For the title character of the Tony-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo, that's all too real. Kimberly is a teen with a rare genetic condition that ages her far more rapidly than normal. As she turns sixteen, she's in the body of a seventy-year-old.
The national tour of Kimberly Akimbo arrives at Walton Arts Center Tuesday night, Dec. 16. In the lead role is Ann Morrison. She made her Broadway debut in the original production of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, and she hasn't stopped since. She says the opportunity to become Kimberly every night is a theatrical triumph.
Ann Morrison: David Lindsay-Abaire wrote this as a play first, and he really felt that he was seeing all his older women friends who don't work as much as we get older. They just don't write plays for us or musicals much, and they're few and far between. And he really wanted to write something for some of these women.
And then when Jeanine Tesori—they've been working together so beautifully—decided it was time to collaborate on another musical, they decided to turn Kimberly into a musical, which the play is wonderful, but it really works so wonderfully as a musical. Their marriage of music and words is beautiful. And so it's because I'm seventy, and I get to play someone who's fifteen turning sixteen. While the audience is there with a sixteen-year-old who has a rare genetic disease that causes her to age every four to five years. So she's actually in the body of a seventy-year-old.
And everybody said, ‘Annie, when this play came out, there's a role written for you.’ I am sixteen in a seventy-year-old body, so I'm not really acting. I just show up.
Kellams: Well, you know, the character Kimberly has to—not only is she physically maturing at a faster rate than is humanly normal, but she also has to mature and navigate as we watch this production. And I wonder what that's like for you, who have gone through life experiences and you get to interject into a sixteen-year-old's body.
Morrison: Here's the interesting thing that a lot of people don't talk about. If she is in a body of a seventy-year-old now and she's only been on the planet for fifteen, sixteen years, that means her prefrontal cortex is in, and fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—that's not completely developed yet.
So when I started to approach this role, I realized that a lot of her awareness, I think one of the reasons why she's so optimistic at only being on the planet for sixteen years is she does have that prefrontal cortex in. So she is more attuned to executive functioning stuff more than her other sixteen-year-old friends, although she still wants to be a part of everything and can get herself into a lot of trouble like sixteen-year-olds would.
And that's why some people go, ‘Why would she agree to do something that her aunt might get her into trouble with?’ It's because she wants that adventure. We all do that. There's a part of us that goes, okay, I know this is probably wrong, but my life is short and I got to have an adventure. And I think that's one of the charming things that people go, yeah, we want an adventure. Sometimes we make really dumb, stupid decisions. But there's heart there. And there's a good reason why.
You know, there's a beautiful song that Seth sings, her little friend who's sixteen, who's probably on the spectrum. His nerdiness is working anagrams, which is why the show is called Kimberly Akimbo, right? Her name is Kimberly, but ‘akimbo’ is part of her anagram name. And they become dear friends because they both think quickly. They're nerds together in that wonderful, quick, fun sensibility.
And here's this great song about figuring out: I've always been the good boy, the good son. And where has that gotten me? Because he's so torn if he should do something that could be really detrimentally bad to do. But he knows that something good may come out of that.
And it's such an interesting show because we look at human behavior and the beauty of the human condition, which is what I love about this play. Because she's got a family that's very dysfunctional. But you love them. We all love them. They swear terribly. They're actually more immature than Kimberly is. She's basically the parent in many ways, and she desperately wants to heal them, in some way.
And that's the other beautiful thing. There's a point in the show where she has an aha moment and realizes that I can't heal you. The only way to get through this is we're going to have to go our separate ways. And what a mature thing to discover. Some of us don't even get that until we're ninety.
Kellams: Or if then, right?
Morrison: If then. There's so many beautiful things about the show, and yet it's hilarious. It's hilarious. I think you're going to have a wonderful time seeing this.
Kellams: There are two songs that you sing as Kimberly that I think really sum up her trip through this production. Early, there's ‘Make a Wish,’ which is so poignant. She's realizing she has limited time on earth—more limited than most—and she has these ideas of what to wish for. And at first it's grandiose, and then it's just this very sweet last part of the song. And then toward the end, you were talking about that aha moment. There's ‘Before I Go,’ when the realization is that I can't heal my family. What's it like to perform those two songs?
Morrison: Right. Oh my God, it's great because ‘Make a Wish’ is in the beginning of the show where she's still fifteen and realizing in a more optimistic way, what can I get? Because I may not be living long. But that doesn't really sink in on the depth that it does in the second act when she starts to age.
You know, I'm seventy, so I have arthritis. I have a finger that clicks. And I thought, what fun for her: if you're sixteen and you get these discoveries, it's kind of a fun new thing that's happening to you. So she discovers the finger. In the second act, she discovers her hip hurts. That's new. Oh, that's a new one. So very subtly, I want to be able to bring a little bit of those changes in there, because she is aging. We're not going to play it the same all the way through. We want to show that there's something happening quickly. I forgot the question.
Kellams: About performing the songs?
Morrison: The songs—‘Make a Wish,’ where she's figuring that all out. And then when she makes that realization, it's a very mature song. ‘Before I Go’ is a very mature song and yet so simple. And yet it's so simple. It's such a simple sentiment: I get this, I understand this, I have love for you, and you have to let me go. And you have to let me go.
And the beauty of it is that the parents don't say anything. They are hit with the reality of the truth. The father triggered it by saying something kind of rude and cruel. And it's for her—she realizes they finally said it. The elephant in the room. He finally said it. And now we can address this. And they can't say anything. They let her say it. And they have to let her go.
And it's so powerful and beautiful. It's fun to watch the actress playing my parents get so moved themselves. You know, we just all are just… You know what's beautiful about this experience?
Kellams: What's that?
Morrison: Everybody in the cast and everybody in the crew—because we travel together—we all adore each other. You don't always get that. We're excited to go to work at night. We enjoy doing the show, and yet we genuinely—I mean, I spend as much time entertaining the crew offstage as I do people onstage. And you don't always get that. So there's a lot of care and love for it. And I think a lot of that is because of the people. The host sets the tone, the people who created the show and the people that steered us through it all have that same genuine heart. And I think it goes all the way out to the house, and the audience gets it too.
Kellams: When you were a young person, you were performing in summer theater, in repertory, high school and college. Does this at all—because Kimberly is fifteen turning sixteen—does this take you back at all to your teenage years?
Morrison: Sort of. But, you know, I have a theater company called Sarasota Productions down in Sarasota, Florida—SaraSolo in Sarasota—and Blake Walton, who I used to be married to, we have this company and we celebrate solo theatre arts. So we go into a performing arts high school. And one of the things that we do is work with sixteen-year-olds finding their voice to do solo—stand on stage and tell their truth.
And so I've been doing this for eight years now, actually longer than that. So there are little tributes to a lot of my students. I drag a foot in a certain way, and that's my tribute to Maddie. I do a certain gesture this way, and that's my tribute to Savannah. All my sixteen-year-olds that I've been around for so long—I say I'm going to live in the show with me. And they've been teaching me how to be sixteen again.
Because the beauty about sixteen is you want to be an adult. There are times when you're very adult when you're sixteen, and there are times when you act like a twelve-year-old.
Kellams: Ann Morrison is the lead in the national touring production of Kimberly Akimbo. It opens Tuesday night at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville. We talked Wednesday afternoon (Dec. 3).
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