`Humble Boy' a smart, funny mix of head and heart.

Byline: PLAY REVIEW By Paul Denison The Register-Guard

ASHLAND - His name is Felix, which is Latin for ``happy,'' but he's not. He's a grown man and a theoretical astrophysicist, but his mother is a black hole in his emotional universe.

Home for his father's memorial service, he finds that mommy dearest has already given away his dad's clothes, has had his bees removed from their hive and has taken up with the man next door.

From this Hamlet-like situation, British playwright Charlotte Jones builds "Humble Boy" into a multiple-metaphoric comedy, twining threads of thought from quantum physics, entomology, botany, mythology and philosophy into her own superstring theory about life, love, growth and death.

Now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, "Humble Boy" is as multi-dimensional as the brain of its befuddled hero, Felix Humble. Directed by Penny Metropulos and engagingly performed by an ensemble of six Equity actors on a lovely circular garden patio set designed by William Bloodgood, the play is funny, thought-provoking and touching.

As the play begins, Felix has seen "an apocalypse of beekeepers," a heavenly host in white, remove his father's bees from their hive. His mother is not angry but "incandescent with rage" because Felix was too distraught to deliver a eulogy, leaving that task to an entomologist "who compared my husband's career to the life cycle of an aphid" and likened her to an arachnid who had spun her web around him.

And Felix is angry that his mother has so quickly "moved on" to their neighbor, a boorishly profane widower whose unmarried daughter Felix once loved and abandoned.

Offsetting, or trying to offset, the tension among these four are a timid woman, who's a longtime family friend, and a placid gardener who calmly tends to the flowers and lets Felix in on a secret: a few bumble bees have survived in a nest away from the hive.

When he's not stammering in confusion, Felix is devastatingly sarcastic, as Hamlet was, about his mother's unseemly haste to replace his father with another man. "Second-hand goods do have a special appeal all their own. don't they?" he says to her suitor, and then he compliments his mother on her ravishing appearance: "Not even a hint of widow's weeds."

It's difficult to write much about the plot turns, or even the metaphors and analogies, of "Humble Boy" without giving away a series of delightful small surprises. In a way, not much really happens, because this is essentially a play about people coming to terms with various types of loss, or what Felix's mother ruefully describes as "terminal disappointment."

The best way to suggest the flavor of the play without spoiling it is just to sketch the characters and the actors who play them.

Linda Alper is delightfully unlikable as Flora, a self-centered and sarcastic woman with an unfortunate knack for the offhand put-down. Flora likes to smooth over unpleasant realities and insists that her garden be planted with the sweetest-smelling flowers. But she has lost her sense of smell. Was it the nose job, or something else?

David Kelly is much more sympathetic as Felix, who grieves over the death of a down-to-earth father who gave him the courage to reach for the stars, reconnects (at least physically, in a smartly played comic scene) with the love of his youth, and longs to break free of his mother's orbit-warping gravitational field.

Tony DeBruno plays George Pye, Flora's unsuitable suitor, as a crass, crude fellow who took care of his wife for a long time before she died and is now hotter to marry Flora than she is to marry him. He listens to Glenn Miller music, brings her flowers and wine and a black opal ring, but she backs him off: "Please don't get ardent, George. It's only half past twelve."

Terri McMahon plays George's daughter, Rosie, as a no-nonsense young woman who's still turned on by Felix but doesn't need him anymore because her life is already filled with the same kind of "Eureka moments" that seem to elude him, for all his scientific brilliance.

John Pribyl, a normally robust comic scene-stealer, here plays Jim, the unobtrusive, imperturbable gardener whose very presence calms and reassures Felix - and, later, his mother.

Suzanne Irving quietly steals everyone's heart as simple, self-effacing Mercy Lott, the Humbles' truly humble neighbor. Although Mercy seems to take everything in stride, she admits to having "brief bursts of unutterable sadness" and takes an herbal remedy "for people who soldier on in the face of complete hopelessness." She has her moment in the sun when she takes a very deep breath and angrily says grace over her inappropriately seasoned gazpacho, summing up many of the play's emotional issues.

"Humble Boy" is a very smart play, with interesting ideas bouncing around like ping-pong balls, but it's a play about the heart as much as the head. Metropulos and her cast never lost sight of that, and the humor rises naturally from six characters whose foibles are exaggerated only slightly above normal.

CAPTION(S):

Felix Humble (David Kelly) contemplates life's multiple dimensions in his family garden.