Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up

The woman onstage is probably in her early to mid 30s, with spindly arms. She wears a plain white cotton top, tattered denim shorts, and sneakers with pink laces. Her blond hair is pulled back in a pony tail. Vaguely tomboyish, she moves around a stage that is covered in lamps, chairs, fans, and years of discarded bric-a-brac. And when she speaks, spinning tales written down in ratty spiral notebooks, Lucy Alibar once again creates magic.

Alibar's Oscar-nominated first film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, was as visually arresting as it was eerily poetic. Now running at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the world premiere of Alibar's memory play Throw Me on the Burnpile and Light Me Up — directed by Neel Keller and performed by the author — is a master class in the marriage of performance and narrative.

Characterizing the work as a series of stories to which she has returned, Alibar shows us incidents from when she was 9 years old. The Florida-bred daughter of a pro bono defense attorney who represents murderers, arsonists, and other disreputable characters, Alibar becomes her dad's secretary. Father and daughter call each other "boss" and are very close. The titular burnpile is an outdoor trash heap where dead clients' files and effects end up. The family also has too many "goddamned cats," a dog who loves to have his coat Fabrezed, and a randy goat named Carl with giant testicles who, in one of Alibar's tales, saves Christmas.

In less-assured hands, the above-described components could lend themselves to an evening of over-the-top Southern kookiness or worse. Burnpile is exactly the opposite. Within a performance space sprung from her memory that feels like half stage, half flea market (scenic designer Takeshi Kata and lighting designer Elizabeth Harper keep the space warm, brightly lit, and nostalgic), Alibar moves through some dark terrain, but she does so entirely without ruefulness, anger or irony.

"You don't know how good you have it," is her daddy's ever optimistic reminder despite some rather convincing evidence to the contrary. "You don't know how lucky you are." He also maintains that "no matter how big a piece of trash you are, you deserve a defender."

Burnpile is Alibar's journey to both of those realizations. En route, she gets assistance from friends, teachers, and nemeses who become allies and even the occasional potential rapist or pedophile.

Solo shows are often crammed with dozens of characters. Not Alibar's. The performer isn't attempting a bunch of voices or contorting her body into multiple shapes. Her daddy and most of Burnpile's other characters sound much like the author. With Jason H. Thompson's projections helping to establish the scene, Alibar serves up seven or eight semiconnected short stories. Under Keller's steady hand, the work comes full circle and leaves us wanting more. We might just get it. Burnpile is being developed as a pilot for FX.

Considering the underlying gentleness both of Alibar's vision and of Keller's direction, Burnpile is quite a feat. Nine-year-old Lucy understands that some people think this lower-middle-class girl with an IQ of 70 is worthless (we get the irony even if she doesn't), but she seems largely unaware of the danger and neglect she encounters throughout the fourth grade. Lucy's daddy may be looking out for his daughter (when he's not defending scumbag clients, that is), but it often feels like nobody else is.

We end up worrying about young Lucy quite a bit over the course of Burnpile's 85 riveting minutes. Fortunately, in this lovely one-person show, which embraces innocence as strongly as it does the need to recognize the predators, we are able to feel concern as well as enchantment.