Having a 12-year-old girl as the main character in, well, anything, is always a risk. So quickly do kids make the leap from cute to annoying (or worse), and when an entire piece of theatre is based around the narration of a hormonal preteen (who makes it a point to remind us that she’s 12-and-three-quarters), things could easily go wrong, and fast. But playwright Kristen Thomson’s one-woman show I, Claudia avoids this pitfall, thanks largely to the insightful dialogue she’s written for the character of Claudia–as well as all of the three other, mask-wearing characters–and stellar acting from Liisa Repo-Martell.

Claudia is your typical 12-and-three-quarter-year-old girl, dealing with typical pubescent problems. There are her girlfriends, who flip-flop more often than members of Parliament, and her insecurities about growing up which should be familiar to anyone who remembers anything about puberty. Mainly Claudia is attempting to deal with the recent divorce of her parents, an all-too-real (and all-too-common) reality for the current generation children. But Claudia is hardly the only one in the play dealing with issues.

I, Claudia is structured as a series of vignettes for four characters–Claudia, Claudia’s grandfather, Claudia’s new stepmother, and Drachman (a janitor from the eastern European land of "Bulgonia"), all played by Repo-Martell. We get to know all of them with surprisingly intimacy. Thomson apparently created the play not at the typewriter but while improvising in front her mirror at home and then transcribing and eventually editing her ramblings into what ultimately became the I, Claudia script–and the play benefits greatly from the naturalism of its dialogue.

Claudia herself might represent one of the most accurate portrayals of an adolescent in recent memory; this show captures all the tics and inflections of a precocious 12-year-old girl so vividly that I wouldn’t be surprised if Thomson had actually hired one to write the character for her. But that’s trying to shift the credit elsewhere, and it is Thomson’s strong writing that makes I, Claudia such a touching experience. Although the characters are all charming in their own ways–even Leslie, Claudia’s new stepmother, whom Claudia likens at one point to the "crap on her mother’s shoe"–the school janitor who ends up befriending Claudia threatens to steal the show with his heartwarming fables "from the old country" and his concern for little Claudia even though he never comes into direct contact with her. (Claudia hides stolen socks from her father in the electrical box of the school’s basement, so he builds a little compartment for them so she won’t be electrocuted by all the wires.)

But credit is also due to Repo-Martell’s performance. She pulls off a convincing eastern European accent for Drachman that never once reminds you of Borat, and her mannerisms also sell the part of Claudia’s aging grandfather Douglas, who can’t remember the name of his son’s new wife, and who, unlike Drachman, enjoys his suck candies.

Maybe it’s the fact that Repo-Martell is not in fact 12 years old that helps us relate to Claudia as strongly as we do. Or maybe, just maybe, I, Claudia is a reminder of how observant we already are at that age.