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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels July 14, 2004 and it's Humble only by name By Robert H. Miller Tidings Reviewer The latest play of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2004 season - "Humble Boy," by Charlotte Jones - opened on Saturday in the New Theatre, with the arena seat configuration. It will run through October 3 and keep audiences laughing all the way. On one level, this very English comedy is a modern telling of "Hamlet." On another, and perhaps more accessible level, it is a stunning study of a mother-son relationship. "Humble Boy" has nothing to do with humbleness but much to do with a certain Felix Humble (David Kelly), a Cambridge astro-physicist in search of a unified field theory. Now in his mid-thirties, he has come home after a seven-year absence to deliver the eulogy to his father James, a biologist, entomologist, and amateur beekeeper who died suddenly. As the play unravels we learn much about both Felix the boy and Felix the man. Much to his mother's chagrin, he turns up in crinkled old graying cricket flannels, though he never was a sportsman. The playwright says that she wanted to write a play set in an English garden, "though I'm not quite sure why." How fortunate for us! For here we are in Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds, a range of hills in Gloucestershire, an area famed for its sheep, picturesque stone houses and villages. Scenic designer William Bloodgood charmingly captures a summer garden there: the pretty profusion of roses, flowers, and shrubs, and even an apple tree, a veritable paradise where the bees love to feast and frolic. It is a honey of a set dominated by a beehive set on a mound, with wind-chimes nearby, and complemented by Michael Chybowski's lighting design. But there are no bees now apparently. From the house, Felix watched the professional team clean out the hive, as ordered hastily by his mother, Flora (Linda Alper). What's more, she packed up all her husband's clothes and sent them to a local charity shop to benefit Romanian orphans. Felix feels the absence. Flora has long been pursued by George Pye (Tony DeBruno). He owns a successful travel coach business and is itching now to marry her. He fondly calls her "Bunny girl" to flatter her about her younger days as a night club hostess, when she wore a brightly colored rabbit costume, complete to the ears and a fluffy white tail. His crudity seems not to bother her. A widower, he has a daughter Rosie (Terri McMahon), a nurse, soon to be a midwife. Admittedly promiscuous, she knows she is the mother of Felix's child from seven years ago, whom she named Felicity. That will blow Felix's mind. An important character is Jim the gardener (John Pribyl) who quietly tends the garden and can recite all the botanical names of all the plants. He even lets Felix in on a secret - that he found a nest of garden bumblebees under the shed. They're the ones that got away, that outwitted Flora. "God love 'em," he says. One of my favorite characters is Mercy Lott (Suzanne Irving), the typically "nice" neighbor whose long-term friendship with the Humbles - she took care of Felix when he was a baby - is dismissed by Flora as "an accident of geography" and someone who leeches off her and has no dress sense. One of the funniest, if macabre, incidents in the play is when Flora hands Felix a gift wrapped in "Happy Birthday" paper. It's his father's ashes that she transferred, with some spillage, from the funeral urn into a smallish earthenware pot with a lid on it. Much will happen to the pot; it's as if the ashes have a life of their own. Director Penny Metropulos deserves great credit for the delicacy with which she handles certain situations that might otherwise have given offense. If at times the dialogue is coarse and "over-bloodied," there is yet considerable wonder-working power in the playwright's pen as she deals with a host of topics from black holes to "eureka" moments. The cast of tried and true actors perform the play with great style, whether David Kelly as the stuttery Humble-boyish Felix; Suzanne Irving as the touching twittery Mercy (she deserved the great hand for her rendition of grace at the meal); Tony DeBruno for perfectly capturing the vulgar ebullience of George Pye; and Terri McMahon for her heart-warming honesty and earthiness as Rosie, especially in her scenes with Felix. Linda Alper, elegantly gowned by costume designer B. Modern, is superb as the vain, cool, supercritical mother who ultimately rejects the vulgarity of her life. John Pribyl invests Jim the gardener with a becoming gentleness. After six years as an actress in theater and television, Charlotte Jones took up writing. "Humble Boy," her fourth stage play, won the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (2000-01) for the most outstanding play written by a woman in the English-speaking world. She is writing the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, an adaptation of Wilkie Collins' novel, "The Woman in White," due to open at the Palace Theatre in London in September. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams