Thoughtful 'Humble Boy' engages beauty & the bees

Thoughtful 'Humble Boy' engages beauty & the bees

Published: 05.15.2008
Thoughtful 'Humble Boy' engages beauty & the bees
CHUCK GRAHAM
Tucson Citizen

It's easy to imagine Tucson is full of people who spend their entire lives wishing they were somewhere else. Not just during summer's searing heat but all the time - living with a different spouse or lover, at a different job in a different house or in a different city.

Inertia holds them prisoner in the Old Pueblo as surely as it held those upscale members of troubled Russian families in Chekhov's plays of life just before the Communist revolution. British playwright Charlotte Jones imagines this cross-pollinated culture plopped down in the muddy middle of England's terminally bland countryside. A place so lacking in imagination it rivals America's own flat-lined suburbs full of houses that look alike, served by chain stores that have all the same stuff.

Jones' play is "Humble Boy," directed by Howard Allen at Beowulf Alley Theatre. Allen has set his production on a stage design that carries reality far beyond any previous Beowulf Alley show. A beautifully painted backdrop of a somewhat hazy sky sets the tone for the contrasts of an immaculate British garden filled with rows of tall and impressively blossoming plants.

A corner wall with a wooden gate frames this garden that covers half the stage. Sections of an impressive two-story country home and its stylish French doors dominate the stage's other half.
Clearly, this is the backyard of a family that takes life seriously. People who believe it is important to keep their manners polished and to know the proper Latin names for all those flowers.

But you can't have flowers without bees to pollinate them. So we notice the bee design on the garden wall, right beside a stack of boxed beehives. Then we learn how the beekeeper discovered he was allergic to stings when a bee stung him and he died on the spot. Right in the middle of that lovely garden. Anaphylactic shock.

The bees giving life to the blossoms and taking life from the beekeeper. Finding all the metaphors are a big part of the pleasure in "Humble Boy," a play that stands in smart contrast to all the silly comedies and smiley-faced musicals that traditionally fill our springtime stages.

This upscale drama is for thoughtful theater-goers. The sort who dedicate a part of every Sunday to the brain-tickling pleasures of that crossword puzzle in The New York Times. A quick check of "Humble Boy" reviews online finds several reviewers who discover parallels to "Hamlet."

Personally, this seems like quite a stretch. It's true there is a waffling young man, Felix (Royce Sparks), who has a conniving mother Flora (Cynthia Jeffery). She is in love with a man other than her husband. It was her husband who died from the bee sting.

But geez. Any Buddhist will tell you everything is a part of everything else, so what's the big deal?
Owen as George is the most engaging character in this family blend of distracting laughter and domestic power plays. We come to appreciate George's patience and the frustration of Felix, a shy intellectual who teaches astrophysics at Cambridge University. His ex-girlfriend Rosie (Elizabeth Leadon) is George's daughter. She also likes to tease Felix.

Adding comedic relief is Roxanne Harley as Mercy Lott, an eccentric family friend. There is a satisfying resolution, though, to all the conflicts covered by years of polite pretending. If only it didn't take so long for all those people to come to their senses. Have killer bees reached England yet?

'Humble Boy' has lots to brag about | www.azstarnet.com ®

'Humble Boy' has lots to brag about
By Kathleen Allen
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 05.16.2008

'Humble Boy' has lots to brag about www.azstarnet.com ®

There's a full, blossoming, tranquil English garden on the stage of Beowulf Alley Theatre.
It's a most unlikely setting for all the lust, disgust, anger and bitterness that populates Charlotte Jones' idea-packed and funny "Humble Boy."

Beowulf opened the play, its season closer, on Saturday.
And what a play. Jones tackles the cosmos. Beekeeping. Dysfunctional families.

The play is loaded with metaphors. You can see them in the characters' names (Flora, Mercy, Rosie, etc.), the life of a bee (it stings, it dies) and the "jittery, frenzied world of quantum mechanics." It's a bit dizzying.

The story outline, however, is a simple one: Felix Humble has come home for his father's funeral. His father, who loved to study bees, died suddenly while working in the garden. Felix has been away studying the quantum theory of gravity — or at least trying to come up with a quantum theory of gravity.

Home, he has to deal with his mother, Flora, a must-be-in-control woman with a recent nose job and a lover she's had for many years.

Throw into this mix a neighbor, Mercy, who sees it as her duty to soothe over wrinkles in everyone's life; George Pye, the crass man with whom Flora is having an affair; and Rosie, George's sweet, level-headed daughter, with whom Felix once had an affair. Oh, and let's not forget the gardener, who keeps the bees buzzing even as Flora tries to stop them.

Beowulf's production, directed with a sure hand by Howard Allen (no relation to this writer), moved quickly and with clarity — it would be easy to get lost in the play and all the ideas, but Allen sees to it that that doesn't happen.

The design of the beautiful garden onstage is the result of many hands, including Allen, Paul Baker and Jacque Askren. It is central to the plot, and it served that role quite lavishly.

Heading up the cast is a remarkable Cynthia Jeffery as Flora. She held herself with such dignity and heart-breaking rigidity that it was easy to define the character. But Jeffrey's acting gave Flora so much more depth. Sure, you don't like her one bit, but she's funny, she's smart, and finally, we realize, she's human.

Elizabeth Leadon is reminiscent of a young Shelley Duvall — tall and thin and earnest (think of Duvall's character in Robert Altman's "Brewster McCloud"). But she also has acting chops: She brought an intelligence and laid-back intensity to her role of Rosie, Felix's one-time love.

While there were fine performances in this production, there were some that felt out-of-sorts, as though the actors were merely playing the characters, rather than living them.

Royce Sparks had a mammoth role in Felix, who stutters around his mother, wears ill-fitting clothing, is not comfortable in his body and gets so side-tracked by the minutiae of words and quantum theories that he can be hard to follow.

He spelled out Felix's sweetness nicely but missed the mark with owning the character. Consequently, he wasn't able to seduce the audience the way it should have been seduced.

"Humble Boy" is wonderfully funny, and it's got some fine, big ideas in it. Even with a mixed-bag of a production, it's a play that can capture the imagination. And that, quite often, can be enough.

Review
"Humble Boy"
• Presented by: Beowulf Alley Theatre.
• Playwright: Charlotte Jones.
• Director: Howard Allen.
• When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Sundays through June 1.
• Tickets: $19; discounts available with online purchases.
• Reservations: 882-0555 or www. beowulfalley.org.
● Contact reporter Kathleen Allen at kallen@azstarnet.com or 573-4128.

Tucson Weekly : Arts : A Comedy Assortment

Tucson Weekly : Arts : A Comedy Assortment

PUBLISHED ON MAY 15, 2008:
A Comedy Assortment
Your local-theater roundup: Beowulf Alley shines; LTW does its best; and Invisible Theatre is doomed by lame material
By JAMES REEL


This week, Tucson theater is reduced to the B-list: bees, boards and bingo. One play concerns the family of an amateur beekeeper; another examines an even more dysfunctional family of thespians; and the third follows a group of friends to a bingo game.

All three plays are well-performed, and all are, to some extent, comedies, but the quality of the material does not in every case rise to the quality of the production.

The best total package comes from Beowulf Alley, which just opened Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy. Up to a point, it's a riff on Hamlet, set in contemporary, provincial, middle-class England, but the parallels are not exact. In Humble Boy, a young man comes home from school upon the death of his father, and learns that his mother has been carrying on with another man. (Not that I'm giving anything away, but in this play, unlike in Hamlet, the father is not a murder victim.) There's an Ophelia figure, the young man's discarded girlfriend; there's also a Polonius stand-in, a rather befuddled spinster neighbor. The young man even has a little suicide soliloquy, and by the time one character starts rattling off the scientific names of garden plants, you expect mad Ophelia herself to pop in with, "There's rosemary--that's for remembrance."

Humble Boy is more or less a comedy, though it's not a Hamlet spoof; Jones merely appropriates some of the Bard's preoccupations and gives them a modern spin. And the humor isn't the sort that generates many laughs along the way; it's something that causes you to smile a bit as it happens, and remember warmly once you leave the theater. Despite the Shakespearean conceits, the clever naming of the characters and Jones' careful attention to structure and pattern, this is an emotionally honest play about real family dynamics.

Not that Jones doesn't indulge in one writerly trick after another. Apparently inspired by Hamlet's puzzling over whether to be or not to be, Jones populates Humble Boy with multiple bees; the dead father was an amateur beekeeper. The household's queen bee is named Flora Humble; she's the stern, adulterous widow, played with steely hauteur by Cynthia Jeffery. The character seems rather limited early on, but by the end, Jones and Jeffery alike have developed Flora's previously unseen dimensions.
Similarly, Royce Sparks initially plays the Humble boy of the title, Felix, as a hesitant, rather slow fellow who stutters on words beginning with B, but gradually reveals the character's intellect and emotional depth. Elizabeth Leadon, as Felix's ex-girlfriend, Rosie, is all prickly stem in no immediate danger of wilting. Roxanne Harley gives a sweet rather than officious performance as the omnipresent neighbor (in the first scene, she's dressed like a refugee from a Beckett play, suggesting that she's as existentially adrift as the Humble family). Roger Owen is intentionally rough and menacing as Flora's lover.
All this, well-directed by Howard Allen, plays out on a lovely garden set designed by too many people to name here; costumer Lori Franklin-Garcia gets everything exactly right, starting with the unflatteringly tight, preppy white cricket outfit in which Felix first appears, a visual manifestation of how poorly Felix himself fits his surroundings.

Felix, the post-doc astrophysicist, may be hoping in vain that a theory of superstrings will bring the universe into elegant symmetry; surely, that seems unlikely in the Humble household. As presented by Charlotte Jones and the Beowulf Alley team, it's more of a teeming hive, producing equal measures of honey and sting.

'Humble' a comedy, plain and simple | www.azstarnet.com ®

'Humble' a comedy, plain and simple www.azstarnet.com ®

Accent
'Humble' a comedy, plain and simple
By Kathleen Allen
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 05.02.2008

Three years ago, director Howard Allen was on one of his regular treks to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when he saw Charlotte Jones' "Humble Boy."
He's been itching to direct it ever since.

"I recognized that it is a wonderful comedy about a family," said Allen, who directs the Beowulf Alley Theatre Company production opening next week.

"Every single character in the play leads you into the center of the play. There are six characters in all, and they are all wonderful parts for actors."

"Humble Boy" is a comedy, plain and simple, said Allen (not related to this writer).
"It has amazingly huge, wonderful laughs," he said.

At the center of "Humble Boy" is Felix, an astrophysicist in his mid-30s.
He was in search of a unified-field theory when he was called home for his father's funeral.
There he is confronted with a mother who never seemed to care much, her kinda creepy boyfriend, a one-time love and the gardener.

Unity, he finds, must include the insanity of family.
The play has been called "Hamlet"-inspired, and playwright Jones has said Shakespeare's tragedy was on her mind when she wrote it.

"The more I thought about the mother/son relationship . . . I saw parallels with 'Hamlet' that I decided to embrace," she said in an interview to Colorado Back Stage.
"The opening situation can be compared to 'Hamlet,' when the son comes home for his father's funeral, but that's it," said Allen.

Mostly, said Allen, "the writing is spectacularly good. It's rich. There are wonderful set- ups and payoffs in the journeys of every one of the characters. All the stuff you look for in a really wonderful comedy."
And, he adds, "there are some poignant moments in the story that will also surprise you.
"And laughs."

Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star Elizabeth Leadon plays Rosie and Royce Sparks stars as Felix Humble in Beowulf Alley's production of "Humble Boy."

● Contact reporter Kathleen Allen at kallen@azstarnet.com or 573-4128.