'Mr. Marmalade' sees childhood's sweet, sour sides

Playwright Noah Haidle's distinctive tone of curdled whimsy is a challenge to stage, as the Huntington's alternately entertaining and exasperating world premiere of his "Persephone" demonstrated this season. But Company One's Boston premiere of "Mr. Marmalade," the play that put Haidle on the map a couple of years back, strikes exactly the right balance between sweet and sour.

"Mr. Marmalade" may sound like a one-joke sketch: A 4-year-old girl, Lucy, has an imaginary friend named Mr. Marmalade who's too busy to play with her. Adam Gopnik, in fact, wrote a cloying New Yorker essay along the same lines about his own daughter's workaholic figment, Ravioli. But Haidle, outrageously funny as he is, never lets the cutesiness potential of the premise smother its darker intimations: that Lucy can imagine nothing but a distracted, neglectful companion because that's the only kind she's ever known.

Director Shawn LaCount scored a coup in casting John Kuntz as the acidic Mr. M, and he wisely lets Kuntz be Kuntz. When Mr. Marmalade isn't rescheduling a brunch date with Lucy or rushing impatiently through an imaginary coffee, he's snorting cocaine, hoarding porn in his briefcase, or beating his equally fictional personal assistant, Bradley. Kuntz imbues every cruelty with a cool detachment that makes his actions at once more absurd and more chilling. He burns like dry ice.

Opposite him, recent Bard College graduate Rachael Hunt is simply remarkable as Lucy. She conveys all the flouncy perkiness and sulks of an actual 4-year-old girl, without a hint of sentimentalizing or exaggerating the emotions of childhood. Haidle sets any actress a difficult task here -- to make us believe in a 4-year-old who can't even read but seems to know and comprehend every variation of adult perversity -- and Hunt knocks it out of the park.

As the only other child in the play, her equally underparented 5-year-old playmate, Larry, Greg Maraio skates to the edge of excessive lisping but stays on the right side of the line. His explanation of just how he came to be the youngest attempted suicide in the history of New Jersey perfectly captures the atmosphere of the whole piece: ridiculous, awful, and weirdly uplifting.

Daniel Berger-Jones, meanwhile, gives the luckless Bradley a pleasing air of wounded punctilio; we, as much as Lucy, are rooting for him to break free of his sadistic employer and get a life. (Until, of course, we remember that he can't, because he's not real, and so why doesn't Lucy just reimagine -- oh, never mind, just watch.) Amanda Good Hennessey doubles as Lucy's busy, man-hungry single mom and her boy-crazy baby sitter, giving each a related but distinctive air of vague affection and unintentionally grave negligence.

Some technical glitches -- a noisily sticking door in set designer Cristina Todesco's otherwise spot-on suburban New Jersey living room, some truncated and therefore incomprehensible lines in the surtitles that periodically flash on a screen -- mar but do not destroy the production's delicate poise on the edge between fantasy and reality, an edge nicely traversed by Nathan Leigh's boppy-creepy sound design. But lighting designer Caleb Magoon should rethink the effect meant to evoke a flickering TV; it looks distractingly like a bulb about to short out, not an intentional choice.

On the whole, though, this is an admirably polished production of a sharp and memorable play. LaCount's program notes are almost irritatingly smug about taking on a work that he (somewhat implausibly) argues no one else in Boston would risk, and "Mr. Marmalade" is indeed nastier and more discomfiting than many a local show. But Company One should just relax about whether it's pushing the limits of what a Boston audience will watch. This may be the saddest comedy you'll ever see. And you'll be glad you did.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.