Wacky plot, family give ‘Fuddy’ zip Audacious comedy opens at Winterport Open Stage

When “Fuddy Meers,” now at Winterport Open Stage, begins with the theme song to “Sesame Street,” it’s a sure sign you’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re in the crazy, mixed-up fun house of David Lindsay-Abaire’s audacious comedy about a wacky family with a few secrets stuffed under the bed and sequestered in the cellar. One guy – is he the father or the brother? – goes berserk at the sight of bacon. The grandmother whams people with shovels. The teen-ager is stoked on pot. An unexpected visitor spouts profanities from a hand puppet named Hinky Binky.

Then there’s Claire, who suffers from a rare form of amnesia that erases all memory at night when she falls asleep. Each morning, she begins anew with introductions to her house, her husband, her son, her life. Except this morning, she is told by a mysterious limping man in a ski mask that her husband is going to kill her today and that she must leave him immediately. Not knowing the truth of any moment, she goes with him.

It’s the beginning of a nightmarish road trip that ultimately gives Claire more information about her past and those who people it. Along the way, she meets her mother Gertie, whose language is so jumbled because of a stroke that “fuddy meers” is her way of saying “funny mirrors.”

It’s more than just the title, however. The “funny mirrors” of life and dreams are also the central metaphor for Claire’s rollicking identity crisis, which is, at least in part, the result of another family secret about domestic violence. She’s Dorothy doing time travel in a dark modern world of sociopaths, and her trip over the rainbow brings her into contact with, well, her family. Cassandra Palmer plays Claire with exactly the right amount of sunny innocence and perplexed curiosity. She is earnest, but she isn’t daft, and that subtlety saves the action from banality.

A druggie (Tanner Cosgrove), ex-convicts (Kurt Madden and Tim Dotts), a bad cop (Kathryn Smith), a potty-mouth puppet (animated by Daniel Clark), a knife-wielding grandmother (Suzan Howard), a shooting, a lisp, a limp, a deformity – this is comedy? In the hands of playwright Lindsay-Abaire (a protege of Christopher Durang, and it shows) and WOS director Reed Farrar, this is, indeed, an odd and acrobatic expose of situations that in any real-life setting would not be so funny. Yet the outrageousness of the family and the loopiness of the plot make it all come together in an often hilarious, one-part Dickens, one-part PeeWee-Herman carnival of the grotesque and gritty.

Farrar, who forsook the regular stage for an arena setting on the floor, concedes that “Fuddy Meers” isn’t typical community theater fare and, consequently, he jiggered the script to soften any local squeamishness about profanity. Otherwise, Farrar goes for the gusto and, while the first act is more tightly realized than the second, the cast firmly turns the ignition on a fast-paced, nearly hallucinogenic screech that skids through outright dysfunction and disability, and crashes into a tale about self-actualization. Of course, who knows what Claire will remember tomorrow?

Technical director Robert DesLauriers, props mistress Jenny Hart and stage manager Martha Macleod are clearly the unseen heroes. The onstage players range in experience, and that shows at times, but their collective gift is presenting an evening in which they are having such a blast, that it would be unforgivable to penalize for gaffes. Racy or not, this is community theater and, as such, entertainingly ambitious.

Winterport Open Stage will present “Fuddy Meers” at 7:30 p.m. April 26 and 27, and 3 p.m. April 28 at Wagner Middle School on Mountainview Drive in Winterport. For more information, call 941-9151.