In 'Pookie Goes Grenading' at Philadelphia's Azuka, Mary Kay Tuomanen goes Riot Grrrl

In precocious playwright J.C. Lee's

Pookie Goes Grenading

, a 14-year-old girl grabs weapons-grade explosives and a few devious friends and heads off into the red night, on a journey to a place where art meets revolt and hunting for "likes" on Facebook takes on high importance for the insurgency.

It's the sort of show on which Philadelphia's Azuka Theatre thrives. "The plays we do are about people who are on the fringes of society, marching to the beat of a different drummer, and Pookie and her posse fit perfectly into that category," says Kevin Glaccum, Azuka's producing artistic director, and director of this 2012-13 season opener, which opened Saturday at Off-Broad Street Theatre.

Glaccum instructed the actors portraying four young characters to keep one foot firmly in the adult world and the other in childhood, with the result that - depending on the moment - their responses are either completely well-reasoned or totally childish. "The changes back and forth are rapid-fire, and finding what part of the characters' personality is responding has been one of the truly fun challenges of the rehearsal process," Glaccum says. "Pookie is a rebel, but even more importantly, she sees herself as a rebel."

Enter Mary Kay Tuomanen, who's 31 but looks half that as she tackles Lee's borderline-tween lead with jejune brio. "Pookie is a Riot Grrrl fantasy shot out of a pop-culture cannon," says the New Hampshire native from her current residence at 16th and Tasker Streets, where she lives with theater artist Aaron Cromie.

She elaborates: "Pookie's a Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie Sucker Punch, roller derby, Pussy Riot, and all sorts of other female bad-assery for which I have a sweet tooth. When I read her first monologue, I thought, 'I want to do this. Even if it's just in an audition, I want to do this.' "

The script, with its no-gag-left-behind policy, is about as subtle as a rabbit punch. Says the not-yet-30 Lee, currently playwright in residence at Marin Theatre Company in the San Francisco Bay Area, "If all my plays were at Thanksgiving dinner, Pookie would be the little cousin that repeats jokes she looked up online but keeps screwing up the punchline, then laughing hysterically at what no one else heard."

Tuomanen's androgynous, youthful visage (but don't call it a "baby face") allows her to bifurcate. On the one hand, this season she'll take on twisted visions of famous middle-aged men, including Napoleon in Vainglorious: The Epic Feats of Notable Persons After the Revolution. Mounted by her own company, Applied Mechanics, it will be staged during spring's Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Also during the festival, the Kimmel Center will present a work Tuomanen devised with her other company, the risqué Bearded Ladies, called Wide Awake: A Civil War Cabaret, in which she'll play firebrand activist John Brown as a vicious bass guitarist who kicks holes in the scenery. ("If looking like a 15-year-old or a middle-aged man adds up to baby face, I'll take the comment," she says.)

On the other hand, it's adolescent girls who fill most of her dance card this season. In addition to Pookie, she's cast as the lead in Arden's Cinderella in December, and as one of the angsty, hormonal students in Spring Awakening at Theatre Horizon next May.

Then there's Clara, the young Christian Dutchwoman whom Tuomanen played this fall in New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656. David Ives' play - about intellectual inquiry, religious conviction, and communal conflictedness - was such a success for Lantern Theater Company in 2011 that it returned for a second, also sold-out run.

Clara is a devout young girl who finds herself, by play's end, devastated but excited by Spinoza's intellect. "I think when people are compelled by Clara's side of the story in New Jerusalem, it's because anyone who has struggled with their faith has had a moment when everything breaks open, when the harder realities of life shatter you and you need to start from scratch," Tuomanen says.

For her, the production was a perfect storm: a great cast in a tightly written play about the ideas of a fascinating man who shaped modern thought, written by a playwright who made his arguments with grace and simplicity.

"Playing Clara, I had a bit of trouble at first because it was the first ingenue role I'd played in a really long time, as I'd been playing so many male roles up until that point," says Tuomanen, including Hamlet in Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre's production in 2011 (the first woman to get a crack at the part in Philadelphia since Charlotte Cushman 150 years ago), as well as gender-questionable Puck in that company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a cross-dressing Rosalind in As You Like It.

"In New Jerusalem," she says, "I found myself trying to 'imitate' a woman, as though I didn't intuitively know how to move that way. It was wonderful to have a second crack at that show, as my own gender identity has begun to mature with age."

A summer Wilma Theater workshop with actor, director, and body/voice theorist Jean-Rene Toussaint helped alter Tuomanen's attitude toward her sex: She had to admit to herself that being feminine didn't mean being weak. "In the second New Jerusalem, I felt more able to move naturally, without adding mincing steps and head tilts that I thought a 'woman' would do."

Tuomanen - a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Kenyon College - credits her time in Paris, training in physical clowning with Jacques Lecoq's L'École Internationale de Théâtre, with providing the oomph necessary to push her Pookie character into life.

Lecoq training, she says, is something that goes into your blood and lies in wait like a virus. "In rehearsal, if you need to mime scaling a building, or leaping into a room, or any of the number of things that are called for in Pookie, you already know how to do it when it's asked of you. Lecoq teaches you to throw your body at a problem first, without letting your brain get in the way."

Pookie is, as Lee planned her, an impulsive, insistent rush of ingenuity, insolence, and insouciance. Says the playwright, "I always warn people: Pookie and this play may seem like a tight little package of quirky, but the whole enterprise is monstrously hard to execute, in that she has to be both driven, focused, and ferocious, but also never lets us forget that ultimately she's a lonely little girl in over her head.

"The play is like that as well - a fast dramatic punch that takes a lot of energy and dedication to land."

Tuomanen's ready.