Playwright: Charlotte Jones
At: Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $30-$35
Runs through: April 10
Hamlet, we recall, left his studies to return home for his father's funeral, where he finds his mother has already remarried, his girl friend Has Issues and his deceased progenitor will not allow him to Move On.
Now imagine that Hamlet is an overweight astrophysicist in his mid-30s, the son of an equally bookish biologist whose research in apian behavior—that's bees, by the way—mandated a country residence where his sophisticated city-bred wife festered in boredom. Imagine further that the widow's current consort is sire to the girl our nerdy prince deserted, little suspecting that she was pregnant with his child. And just to complicate matters more, imagine that the garden is haunted by the ghost of the late clan patriarch.
The allegorical significance of 'Humble' being our hero's surname, and 'Pye', that of the poacher on his mum's affections is scarcely accidental. ( And yes, somebody puns on 'Humble Pye' before we're finished. ) Neither can it be coincidence that Mrs. Humble is named 'Flora' and Miss Pye, 'Rosie'. Ditto the former's offspring having been christened 'Felix', meaning 'happiness', and the newly acknowledged descendent, 'Felicity', its feminine counterpart. The characters speak in the hyperliterate idiom associated with upper-class Brits ( 'I am INCANDESCENT with fury!' snaps Flora at one point ) , their repartee riddled with allusions, both classical and contemporary, as well as lightning witticisms.
Charlotte Jones' expertise at her genre, however, often impedes our comprehension in its eagerness to flaunt itself. Analogies are introduced—Icarus, Anosmia, Utopian hives, String Theory—and then left underdeveloped, insufficiently integrated or outright abandoned. The late James Humble makes his presence known throughout the play in the ashes Felix hesitates to scatter—some of which end up, literally, in the soup—but additional manifestations suddenly occuring in the final minutes of the play arise too swiftly for us to fully appreciate.
James Bohnen's cast for this Remy Bumppo production, led by Shawn Douglass as the troubled Felix, imposes discipline and coherence on a text threatening to drown in its own cleverness—even as storefront-circuit rudeboys may want to note David Darlow's gleeful 120-degree simulated piss on Old Dad's crematorial urn.