Funny and thought provoking, Humble Boy—now playing at the Santa Maria Civic Theater—is a gem of a play about what happens to an English family when the father dies and the son comes home.
Plot sound familiar? Think Hamlet, only with more laughs.
This play falls into the category of dark comedy, which means (I looked it up) making light of serious matters. Some of the serious matters in the play are: who loves whom and how much, seductions past and present, and misunderstandings about the contents of an urn.
The play is not widely known in this country, even though it had its U.S. premiere in 2002 at the prestigious Manhattan Theater Club in New York City, and won the Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award for that year.
This was my first encounter with both the work and its author, Charlotte Jones.
When you enter the Santa Maria Civic Theatre and take your seat, you will be immediately smitten with the set. It is a lovely English garden with an apple tree, a picket fence, and a terrace.
The recently deceased father, a teacher of biology, kept bees as a hobby. The beehive sits in the garden, and we hear music from “Flight of the Bumblebee” as the play begins. The bees and the hive are a metaphor for some of what happens in the play.
The glamorous mother, Mrs. Flora Humble (Sally Buchanan), is the queen bee, and as in a beehive, everything revolves around her. She is also recovering from having plastic surgery on her nose.
The fashion-conscious Flora and her only child, the nerdy Felix (Jeffrey Staso), are and have been at odds with one another for some time. Felix comes home for his father’s funeral from university, where he studies astrophysics in an obsessive search for unified field theory.
Don’t be put off by Felix’s intellect. Underneath his fertile brain, there beats the heart of a vulnerable soul with a tendency to stutter every now and then.
Mercy Lott (Lynda Mondragon) is a close friend of Flora’s. She harbors romantic feelings for the man who harbors romantic feelings for Flora.
George Pye (James Wyett) is not mourning the passing of James Humble, because he and Flora have been having an affair for some time and he is over the moon, ready to propose.
George is not favorably disposed toward Felix because his daughter, Rosie Pye (Katie Rhine), had been in love with Felix before he ran off to university and left her to wallow in rejection. She had a daughter, which is Felix’s child, but he didn’t know the child was his. Flora, his mother knew, but she chose not to tell him.
Rosie flirts with Felix, after expressing her anger at him for abandoning her. Her attempt to seduce him on a wicker love seat is hilarious. She is curiously persistent, but he objects to her aggressively amorous approach.
The recently deceased husband, James (Gary Prober), has come back as a ghost (and a gardener) throughout the play. He is in and out of the play, seen by no one but Felix until the end when Flora is able to see and converse with him.
The cast does a great job. Staso is superb and endearing as the sometimes-bumbling man who is beset by conflicted emotions and the sounds of bees buzzing in his ears.
Buchanan’s performance is a tour de force. She is appropriately imperious as the Queen Bee mother. As Mercy, Mondragon’s facial expressions say it all. She is ever so capable of letting us know what is going on with her.
As the ghost gardener, Prober is a steady-as-she-goes kind of fellow. It is not easy to play an apparition. Prober imparts genuine concern for his wife and son.
Wyett exploits the comic potential in his role of the Queen Bee’s grown-up boy toy, George. Often he is daffy as the day is long. We flinch when we witness his mean streak in his encounters with Felix, the father of his granddaughter.
Rhine, as Rosie, does a fine job as the peacemaker, trying to rein in her father’s emotional excesses. She elicits sympathy for the pickle she is in—being in love with someone who is not able to love her back.
Director Cody Fogh’s great affection for the play shines through. He also designed the garden set, which was ably constructed by Joshua Michelsen and Stephen Stitzel.
Sarah Buchanan was costume seamstress and make-up artist. Devin Herrick managed lights and sound, and Kyle Hawkins (whom I remember as Horton the elephant from Seussical) is the cheerful stage manager in what amounts to another fantastic show from the Santa Maria Civic Theatre.
Contributor Helen Ann Thomas loves a nice garden, on or off the stage. She can be reached through Managing Editor Joe Payne at [email protected].
