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.
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.
