Humble Boy Director's Notes

On one level, this very English comedy is a modern telling of "Hamlet." On another, and perhaps more importantly, it is a stunning study of a mother-son relationship. Ms. Jones has written a play that buzzes with ideas – superstring theory, beekeeping, and, most notably, the challenge of the parent/adult child relationship. What struck me most was the play’s use of Astrophysics as a metaphor, and how this young man’s search to understand the “physics” of his parents meeting, and long marriage mirrors his passionate search for the “quantum theory of gravity.”

Never very good at math, all of the physics references were way over my head. It took quite a bit of research to get my head around what terms like "quantum mechanics," “string theory,” “chaos theory” and “M-theory” mean. I am proud to say I understand theoretical physics a bit more now, and interestingly, I found it all opened my mind even further to this family's very funny and moving story.

The parent-adult child struggle is explored beautifully in this play. When we reach adulthood and begin to relate to our parents as fellow adults, the stories of their youth, the way they met and fell in love, become more and more important to us. Yet the more we learn, the less we in fact understand. As Felix Humble discovers, the parents we know are not necessarily the same people we hear described in our parent’s memories. The challenge of reconciling who our parents are with whom they were seems daunting at best. Nevertheless, if we are lucky and look hard enough, it can be “like pointing a telescope at a blank piece of sky and seeing a star that (we) have never seen before.”

There is a sort of game that the Humble Family plays with “collective nouns.” “Collective nouns” are nouns that denote a collection of persons or things regarded as a unit, such “a herd of antelope” or “a flock of birds.” After his father’s death, Felix searches for comfort by playing this game. During my research, I found some very interesting collective nouns. Here are some fun ones: (these are not made up – they are real!)

An abomination of monks

An ambush of widows

A kaleidoscope of butterflies

A tower of giraffes

A troubling of goldfish

A murder of crows

A den of thieves

A charm of finches

A clutch of eggs

It has been a privilege to work on this wonderful play with such a gifted company of actors.