Mining a family tradition

Kate Burton, her son, and longtime friend Nicholas Martin reunite in 'Corn Is Green'

Morgan Ritchie (left) with his costar and mother, Kate Burton, and director Nicholas Martin after a rehearsal for ''The Corn Is Green'' last week. (Evan Richman/Globe Staff)

When Tony nominee Kate Burton steps onstage tonight with her son Morgan Ritchie in "The Corn Is Green," with her longtime friend Nicholas Martin looking on as director, their reunion at the Huntington Theatre will have a special resonance.

The three previously collaborated on the play at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2007. A comedy about a spinster teacher who discovers an illiterate but gifted Welsh coal miner and slowly transforms him from a bully to a brilliant student, in part to feed her own ego, "Corn" earned strong reviews. Martin hoped to restage it with them someday at the Huntington, where he was about to begin his last season as artistic director.

But last September, as the Huntington was set to begin rehearsals, Martin suffered a mild stroke, landing him temporarily in a wheelchair. Facing a long and challenging recovery, he has been making tremendous strides, he says. And his spirits have been boosted by working so intimately with close friends.

"This particular show is like family to me," he says by phone, sounding delighted. "I am certainly healing. I am stronger than I was. I am impatient and independent, but I can afford to be neither."

A regular at Burton's dining-room table in New York, Martin is so deeply entrenched within the family that 20-year-old Ritchie, a student at Brown University, absent-mindedly refers to him as Uncle Nicky, a man who has been there since before he was born and knew just what to say during rehearsals for a particularly difficult scene in the play.

At Williamstown, Ritchie confesses, he was extremely nervous about taking on his first major role, side by side with his famous mother. Ritchie plays the miner Morgan Evans; Burton has the part of Miss Moffat, the teacher.

His character "is the focal point of the play, which puts a lot of pressure on me," Ritchie says, sitting in a coffeeshop during a rehearsal break. "That and standing next to the great Kate Burton."

Tall with a scruffy beard, bundled up in coat and scarf, Ritchie smiles easily as he recalls the challenges he faced in the Williamstown production. Working with his mother, who gave him the space he needed, was a delight, he says. But the pace was fast and chaotic, and he wasn't completely comfortable.

"I was having a lot of trouble by the second week," he says - specifically in one scene in which Morgan comes back from visiting Oxford College. Now fluent in English, he describes the excitement he feels. Looking up at the moon, he says he feels like he did when he was drunk and a lowly miner.

"I can't say what the problem was, I just felt like I was babbling on, not doing justice to the gravity of what he was feeling," Ritchie says. "I tried to make it artificially exciting. Nicky said to me, 'You can do this. I know you can do this,' and 'Make the words real to you.' "

Ritchie sat down on his own, repeating the words to the scene over and over again until he felt like he owned it. Now it is his favorite scene in the play.

"Isn't Morgan enchanting?" muses Martin, now artistic director at Williamstown. "People have said to me, 'Your chance paid off.' I never felt like I took a chance on Morgan. The minute this project was initiated, I thought it would be madness not to use him. I knew he'd be OK in this part. He's astonished me."

The play, written by Burton's godfather Emlyn Williams and performed on the radio by her father, the famed Welsh actor Richard Burton, is a chance for Ritchie, who grew up surrounded by theater types in New York, to spread his wings. Acting since he was a kid, in minor roles at Williamstown and in school plays, he remembers when he first told his mother that he wanted to follow in her footsteps. He was 14.

"She was like, 'What, are you crazy? Be something else. Be a lawyer,' " he says.

Burton remembers it well.

"He told me that when he was in the ninth grade," she says with a loud sigh over the phone. "To be frank with you, I think it was an awful young age to tell me he wanted to be an actor. We were watching the Oscars. At that point he had done a little bit of work at Williamstown in the summer, and he had done some stuff at school."

When he was 16 she watched him perform in a school play. It was revelatory.

"I said, 'Well, that's it!' " she says. "And at the age of 20 he is more innately gifted than my father, Richard Burton - certainly than I was - at that age."

The first 10 days of rehearsals for the Huntington production, Martin was busy in convalescence. That left the acting team alone, working their lines and refreshing their memories of scenes without the benefit of their director.

"The only way we could have pulled off something like this at this time would be to do a show we had already done," Burton says. "It would have been much more arduous for Nicky to be directing a new play."

Meanwhile, Burton saw in her son a great deal of maturity since he had performed the role in Williamstown. Two years, from 18 to 20, is a great deal of time to grow artistically, she says, and she recognized greater confidence in him.

"It was fascinating," she explains. "It was good and hard and interesting. It's been a very odd experience working with your child. I respond to him on two levels at all times. I sometimes have to stop myself from saying something I would say as his mom and respond to him as his fellow actress."

Martin returned at the exact moment they needed him, she adds. Burton was thrilled that he looked far better, and was just as charming as always, she says.

"I had seen Nicky in the hospital and I was fearful," she says. "My anticipation seemed so much worse than it actually was. He was just sitting there in a little pair of striped pajamas, looking like Nicky. The amazing thing for us was when he walked into rehearsals, it was like, 'Omigod! You are walking so much better!' "

Now the three are back together and ready to stage "The Corn Is Green" for Huntington audiences.

And how is the young star feeling?

"In some ways it makes me more nervous. I really want to do well in front of my mom and Uncle Nicky," Ritchie says. "On the other hand, it's so comfortable to walk into rehearsal and see your mom and Uncle Nicky, I can't wait."