marmaladehandinpants When impossibly precocious 4-year-old Lucy’s imaginary friend Mr. Marmalade shows up in the opening moments of the play that bears his name, and that friend is a speedy adult type, I probably couldn’t have been blamed for fearing I was about to endure some retread of the 1991 Phoebe Cates film Drop Dead Fred.

But while both film and play trot out the concept of childhood imaginary friends as a path to comment on adulthood, they split off at a fork in the road: we see Cates’s Lizzie get older and lose touch with her childhood spirit, while Lucy…But I’m getting ahead of myself. As does Lucy.

In fact, that’s her problem. When I call Lucy impossibly precocious, I mean it literally. Playwright Noah Haidle has created Lucy not to pass as a realistic preschool-aged tot, but to reflect the adult-world realities that are all around her and that will, in whatever ways, invariably shape her. In play are the cheap TV, bad marriages, broken promises, substance addictions, sexual fixations, loneliness, and depression that we so-called adults (“so-called” because there’s not some magical border we cross from youth to coming of age—part of Haidle’s point) take for granted. Because c’est la vie, you know?

Despite the play’s title, Lucy (whom Calli Dunaway realizes by perfectly marrying youthful innocence with adult cynicism) is the star, Mr. Marmalade serving as the device by which Lucy learns that the future that awaits—or may await, an important distinction that Haidle has in mind—her is not all it’s cracked up to be.

But Lucy’s glorification of adulthood is born out of the fact that childhood itself ain’t necessarily paradise. Already she knows something about loneliness, and then she meets 5-year-old Larry (A.J. Pacheco, who really brings the awww factor), already with a suicide attempt under his belt.

“Everybody says, ‘Enjoy your childhood while it lasts,’” he marvels. “If this is the part of my life that’s supposed to be carefree, I don’t want to see the rest of my life!”

But Calli and Larry—and even Bradley (Joe Howells, sunshine in every one of his scenes), Mr. Marmalade’s personal assistant—are learning, learning from each other, learning how to piece together a good life from the jigsaw that is the world at large. “I don’t know what I want,” says Bradley near play’s end. “You’ll figure it out as you go,” rejoins Lucy, already a lifetime wiser than she was at curtain up.

That Angel Correa, as Marmalade himself, doesn’t steal the show is a testament to how good everyone onstage is. Last I saw him he was wonderful as another title character in a play I didn’t much like (Clive Barker’s The History of the Devil—see review here). In Mr. Marmalade he brings the same frenetic energy, silly and scary, tender and terrible, a childhood friend and nightmare. When Correa bites into a role, it better get a rabies shot.

The remainder of the roles are filled out by Matt Anderson and Amy Louise Sebelius, both of whom are great in each part they inhabit, including as some dim-witted, dickish flora.

Director Olivia Trevino saw something in Haidle’s script that many critics have not (hence the absence of positive pull quotes in the Garage’s promo material), and she’s right. It’s not a perfect piece of writing, and God knows it could fall flat without the right actors to animate it, but it’s not just black comedy out of the mouths of babes. Kudos to Trevino for a set-design concept that Haidle would have done well to have put into the script to bring home one of his main themes.

“Imagination, life is your creation,” sings Lucy at curtain up (yes, the Aqua song). With Mr. Marmalade, Haidle is telling us that while this applies to our imaginary friends, we also have some say in choosing our real, grown-up lives.

And he’s right.

Lesson learned.

MR. MARMALADE THE GARAGE THEATRE • 251 E 7TH ST (JUST OFF LONG BEACH BLVD) • LONG BEACH 90813 • 562.433.8337 THEGARAGETHEATRE.ORG • THURS-SAT 8PM • $18; $15 FOR STUDENTS & SENIORS; CLOSING NIGHT + PARTY $20 • THROUGH MAY 21