Marissa Kamin's The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero is about as up-to-the-minute as a play can be. It's too sweet to feel edgy, but via sharp, racy dialogue, sparkling performances, and immersion in the culture of the YouTube-and-bulimia generation, we witness the pressure cooker of twenty-first century teenage life with what feels like scary accuracy.

Like an episode of Law and Order, the play seems "ripped from the headlines." Gillian Jacobs gives a broadly acted yet finely tuned performance as Girl, a high school senior with spectacular test scores and a stellar record who nonetheless has to worry about whether she'll get into an Ivy League school as she hopes to (and as her father expects). Meanwhile the pressure to be fashionable, thin, pretty, and sexually active - but not slutty - squeezes her from another angle. Bulimia, cutting, and drug abuse jostle with celebrity worship, blog culture, Facebook-style social networking, and academic pressure, in a nobody-wins battle for the frayed souls of Girl and her schoolmates.

Kamin, along with director Ben Rimalower, cleverly uses artificial forms to show us an unfortunately all-too-real world. Girl and her more carefree and effusive friend, Girl Chorus (the charming, elfin Anna Chlumsky of the My Girl movies) emerge from snappy, highly distilled dialogue as vividly sympathetic child-women. "Which diet are you going to do?" "I don't know... Moderation?" (Hysterical laughter.) The script is full of such pithy if not actually deep bon mots. "The world is just a big high school, except that instead of popular kids there are celebrities." These transparent quips flow from the stage in such numbers and with such good cheer that they add up to something affecting.

 Brian J. Smith, Gillian Jacobs and Christopher Sloan in The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero. Photo by Monique Carboni.
The funny and versatile Christopher Sloan and Brian J. Smith mug through an assortment of (mostly) male roles, while the impossibly perky Kate Reinders - who's done the Kristin Chenoweth part in Wicked on Broadway (and it's obvious why) - is perfectly cast as Superstar, a Barbie doll figure who functions as a sort of modern god or elemental force, a combination club-kid celeb and game show host who mentors and hectors Girl through her social evolution.