Humble Boy

The Ross Valley Players are currently staging HUMBLE BOY by Charlotte Jones. To borrow from an unsubstantiated stereotype, it is rare that the artistic, liberal arts’ mind attains sufficient knowledge of the hard sciences to weave physics into the fabric of a novel or a play. Thomas Pynchon, author of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, is one noteworthy exception. Charlotte Jones may well be another. Miss Jones, to her credit, seems not only well versed on relativity and quantum mechanics, she knows enough about string theory to use it as a metaphor in this intricate, complex, symmetrical and airtight play. Imagine the Discovery Channel’s THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE being wrought into a stage drama, without being dry nor irrelevant. This play, as the film majors are want to say, “works on so many levels.”

Humble Boy is a sophisticated, erudite comedy about abrogated vows, waning hopes and the rustic joys of bee keeping. Felix Humble, played by Matthew Purdon, is a Cambridge astrophysicist in search of the unified field theory. His father, an entomologist has recently died, ironically of anaphylactic shock brought on by a bee sting. Felix has returned to his parents’ home in the Cotswolds, ostensibly to attend his father’s memorial service.

Flora Humble, played Robyn Wiley, chooses to announce her engagement before the canopic jar, containing the cremated remains of her husband, has cooled. As in HAMLET, the grieving son is not eager for his widowed mother to marry into stultifying mediocrity: videlicet: George Pye (superbly played by Simon Boddington). While resisting his mother’s nuptial vision, Felix is brought into a confrontation with his own unfinished past.

The humming of missing bees, brings Felix closer to the humming of the basic building blocks of the universe, i.e. strings, and to the elusive Unified Field Theory. On another level, an eponymous bee, unites Flora Humble, in spirit, with her polar opposite: her deceased husband.

The set, designed by Benicia Martinez, is worthy of Noel Coward’s HAY FEVER. It combines the simple beauty of nature with the refined elegance of intelligent living. Watching the play, which is set in balmy August, reminds the audience that if winter rain is pelting the roof of the Marin Gardens’ Barn, then summer weather is less than 10 months away.

For tickets to a thoroughly enjoyable evening and a glimpse of summer, call the RVP Box Office at 415 456-9555.