Little buddy

The new show at the B Street Theatre—The Late, Great Henry Boyle, a new play by Michigan writer David MacGregor—is something of a trip down Memory Lane.

It’s charming most of the time, sometimes delightful—even we’ve been there before. It features self-centered academics who collapse of their own weight (new local Anthony De Fonte, doing a semi-reverse on his part as a drunken professor in the Sacramento Theatre Company’s Educating Rita last fall). Also a hard-driving literary agent who clearly never reads a page of text (B Street regular Kurt Johnson in a tasty small part)—the character uses his Marine Corps past to flog authors into talk-show gigs.

There’s also a wild episode involving a walking, talking 6-foot-tall rodent from South America. Very funny, also brief, and probably just as well.

At the center of the show is an intensely sincere and very private professor of medieval studies, with a bent for alcohol, who can’t deal with the Age of Television. He’s played by Ken Roht, sporting a weathered face that looks like Harry Potter turned 40-plus and gone to seed. This guy has been reduced to living in his campus office, having been ditched by his wife. He sustains himself by re-reading dusty old texts.

The shy medievalist ultimately finds solace in the arms of a good-hearted, slender, sexy waitress who periodically enrolls in a university course, just to keep her brain alive, and jogs to stay fit. The character (the only female part in the play—talk about a hinge) is done admirably by Jamie Jones, veteran of several B Street shows.

There are abundant references to 6th-century philosopher Boethius—author of The Consolation of Philosophy—and an almost equal number of references to the unmourned TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island. (You pays your money and you takes your chances at the B Street Theatre.) Rookie director Dana Brooke (more familiar as an actress) rides the tide of a solid cast. Too soon to offer an opinion of her skills in this new capacity.

Ostensibly this play is about the perils of becoming a pop celebrity—the shy professor writes a novel that shoots up the best-seller list, and he quickly becomes much more famous than he wants to be. But beneath that plot line, the play’s ultimately a formula comedy, i.e. romantic comedy (just in time for Valentine’s Day) laden with literary and pop-culture references. The Late, Great Henry Boyle yields few surprises, but it is well acted, and some of the jokes about teachers in particular are very funny. The show will serve quite nicely as a date-event during the month to come.