A dark, funhouse comedy with twists and turns at the SaGāJi

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire has said, “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.” Such is the case with his most famous play, the darkly comic, “Fuddy Meers,” which will be staged by the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company March 21-April 6 at the SaGāJi Theatre.

Lindsay-Abaire earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for Rabbit Hole, which was nominated for five Tony Awards. Fuddy Meers, Lindsay-Abaire’s first play, is a screwball comedy that revolves around the fact that the main character, Claire, wakes each morning as a blank slate; she is a psychogenic amnesiac: her memory is erased whenever she goes to sleep.

“This piece is not your traditional comedy,” said Alan Osburn, FAC Artistic Director of Performing Arts. “David Lindsay-Abaire has crafted a strange, and at times, a laugh-out-loud comedy that in the end brings us face-to-face with some serious social realities.

“The vision of the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company is to produce diverse material that is both enlightening and entertaining,” Osburn said. “It is not an accident that this wacky adult comedy is coupled with the spring musical, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.”

As the play opens, Claire wakes up. She is greeted by her chipper husband, who explains her condition, hands her a book filled with all sorts of essential information, and disappears into the shower. A limping, lisping, half-blind, half-deaf man in a ski mask, pops out from under her bed and claims to be her brother, there to save her. Claire's info book is quickly discarded, and she's hustled off to the country-house of her mother, a recent stroke victim whose speech has been reduced to utter gibberish. Claire's journey gets even more complicated when a dimwitted thug with a foul-mouthed hand puppet pops up at a window and her driven husband and perpetually stoned son show up with a claustrophobic lady-cop that they've kidnapped.

Every twist and turn in this funhouse plot brings Claire closer to revealing her past life and everything she thought she'd forgotten. It is one harrowing and hilarious turn after another on this roller coaster ride through the day of an amnesiac trying to decipher her fractured life. This poignant and brutal new comedy traces one woman's attempt to regain her memory while surrounded by a curio-cabinet of alarmingly bizarre characters. This hilarious comedy is recommended for mature audiences.

“A comic world that is dark, distorted and dangerous
but also … entertainingly original” – Backstage

This production is directed by Kelly Walters, who was last seen as an actor at TheatreWorks in Santaland Diaries and Doubt. He was nominated by both the Pikes Peak Arts Council and the Denver Post Ovation Awards as Best Actor for his portrayal of the Baker in the FAC award-winning production of Into the Woods. He was the director of the 2005 FAC holiday production of She Loves Me.

Lynn Jacobs, appearing in her first FAC Theatre Company production, stars as Claire. She was last seen in the TheatreWorks’ production of Arabian Nights. Dylan Mosley plays Richard, the husband. Last fall Mosley played Peter in The Heidi Chronicles for the Star Bar Players, after returning from duty in Iraq. 

Steve Emily, who appeared as Jacob Marley, in the FAC Theatre Company production of A Christmas Carol, plays the role of Phillip, the limping man, who is blind in one year and deaf in one ear. Leah Chandler Mills plays Gertie; she was last seen as George Seurat’s mother in Sunday in the Park with George and played Reba in Last Night of Ballyhoo in 2007. Cory Moosman (Millet) returns to the SaGaJi after starring in numerous FAC productions, including The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Little Shop of Horrors. Two FAC newcomers Colin Fitzgerald (Kenny), a 10^th grader at Lewis Palmer High School, and Elizabeth Frazier (Heidi), round out the cast.