Charlotte Jones believes when your number is up, you go down. Every man has a predetermined number of heartbeats, every bumblebee a finite number of wing flaps. When that number hits, the buzzer simply stops and drops. The exercise industry may take issue with that, but it’s an artistic concept worth exploring.
Unfortunately, the number also comes up for the British playwright’s peculiar new comedy, “Humble Boy,” long before the end of its nearly three-hour regional premiere by the Firehouse Theatre Company. Somewhere crossing the pond from England to the U.S., this widely hailed comedy falls flat. The bee’s fate is perhaps inevitable for any comedy that attempts to keep its wings flapping for that long.
Firehouse’s ambitious attempt, in cooperation with the Everyman Theatre Company, boasts a stellar cast and a stylish garden set design by Michael R. Duran. But the comic material just does not translate well to America – not when the program requires a two-page glossary of 40 terms that a reader can’t see in the dark anyway.
The story opens with Felix Humble (Stephen Pearce) returning home to Cotswolds for the funeral of his beekeeper father. He’s a stuttering, lethargic astrophysicist in serious need of a Zoloft. He babbles dead-serious weirdities about not being able “to hold all the harmonies in my head.” His overbearing mother Flora (Deborah Persoff) laments her doubly bad luck “to have married a biologist and given birth to a physicist.”
You might be asking yourself, “and this is a comedy?” That anachronistic disconnect between form and feeling is what makes “The Humble Boy” so confounding to watch. It’s much easier to love the effort than the actual result.
Flora has long carried on with neighbor George Pye (a gung-ho Verl Hite). His daughter Rosie (Katharyn Grant) isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, but amid all these dour faces and sour demeanors, her entrance infuses the production with a needed dosage of carefree energy.
The most unnecessary character is also the most welcome – Kendra Crain McGovern’s pining Mercy Lott. There’s also a gardener (Dell Domnik) at the heart of a head-scratchingly mystical climax that is meant to be touching but here is a case of unearned sentimentality.
This discrepancy of styles might be mitigated if the play weren’t being promoted as a freewheeling comedy. You’re more apt to think you are in a dysfunctional Pinter play (or at this length, make that three successive dysfunctional Pinter plays).
It’s not that “Humble Boy” can’t be staged as a broad comedy – after all, the script calls for the dead dad’s ashes to get accidentally stirred into the soup. Or as a Noel Coward-esque farce – the best exchange is a witty debate over the most effective methods of suicide.
But director Richard H. Pegg has clearly opted for sobriety, and that makes for a languid pace that calls more for awkward introspection than laughs.
Perhaps he was saddled, as any director might, with what to do with Jones’ intended resemblances to “Hamlet.” Not in a satiric way – her protagonist is more dour than the Dane; his mother meaner than Gertrude. Pegg mimics the source material, so the mood shifts from melancholy to malevolent as contemplations take place on physics, fate and the origins of love.
But Jones often deviates from “Hamlet” too, which only confuses things further. Our effervescent “Ophelia” (Rosie) is Jones’ least suicidal character; her Claudius (George) may be a playboy, but he’s no murderer. In the end these “Hamlet” strings serve no real purpose but to keep the company from achieving anything else.
In the cast’s six excellent actors one can see the potential for six better performances, if only Pegg would take off the handcuffs. Persoff’s glamorous Flora might be outrageously bitchy; instead she’s chillingly cruel and we’re never told why.
Pearce’s crippling self-loathing seems fleetingly benign, George is just a character type, Rosie gets weighted down having to deliver stilted wisdoms (“Love embarrasses you, Felix; you can’t turn it into an equation”) and weepy Mercy’s only purpose seems to be as a Polonius stand-in.
But McGovern’s performance as Mercy comes closest to getting Jones’ intended tone right. Asked to say grace, Mercy launches into why she has taken a sabbatical from God, which leaves her near tears and us in actual laughter.
With more moments like that, “Humble Boy” might have flapped its wings all the way across the pond to dry land.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Humble Boy”
**½
COMEDY-DRAMA|Firehouse Theatre Company, in association with Everyman Theatre Company|Directed by Richard H. Pegg|Starring Deborah Persoff and Stephen Pearce|At John Hand Theatre, 7653 E. First Place|THROUGH JULY 16|8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sunday and June 26; 8 p.m. July 7 and 14|2 hours, 50 minutes|$13-$15|303-562-3232
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“COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED)” The Miners Alley Playhouse takes on the irreverent deconstruction of the Shakespeare canon. 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays, through July 17 at 1224 Washington Ave., in Golden. Tickets $16-$18 (303-935-3044).
“MOTHER WHIMSY” The Arvada Center presents this original fairy tale written by Christopher Willard and Jamie Bruss. When a young girl named Lilly comes looking for new stories from a vacationing Mother Goose, her substitute sweeps her off on a madcap search for “The Book of Stories Untold.” Stars Susie Leiser, Sheila Swanson McIntyre, Mark Pergola and Bill Berry. 10 a.m. and noon most Tuesdays-Thursdays through July 28 in the outdoor amphitheater, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd. (also 7 p.m. Wednesdays in July). Tickets $7, four for $20 (720-898-7200).
-John Moore
