Girl in the Goldfish Bowl

If the “precocious” pregnant teen in the “indie” flick Juno made you want to hurl—we frankly still need somebody to hold our hair back after being tube-fed the true but falsely rendered notion that quirky girls need love, too—you’ll probably admire the quicksilver performance late-twentysomething Kaitlin Byrd is giving as a legitimately precocious ten-year-old narrator in Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. As a hyper-curious, dangerously verbal Catholic school tyke whose parents’ marriage is rotting despite its shiny surface (the year is 1962, so you could call their household “Cameloathe”), sad-eyed Byrd turns out a performance that has to be difficult to execute but couldn’t be easier to watch.

The only problem is that her four cast mates, who all appear to be near her in age, are required to play world-weary adults; the effect is unconvincing, and the imbalance impossible to ignore. Panych’s play—in which a family is rocked by a mysterious boarder who may or may not be the reincarnated soul of the girl’s recently deceased goldfish (a dramatic metaphor that may or may not be total malarkey)—can’t succeed unless the cast can sell the cock-eyed melancholy of wistful sentiments like, “Have you seen that rope I tried to hang myself with last year?” Too fresh-faced, Peters’s likable but miscast actors aren’t well matched or credibly coached. (Only Shelton, as an “old maid” boarder, convincingly conveys boozy lust.) Still, the performance at its center is a rare Byrd.