'Humble Boy' entertains with words and wit

Diego Arciniegas, artistic director of the Publick Theatre, directs his company's production at the Boston Center for the Arts with finesse and a carefully tuned ear for the play's rapidly shifting tones: one moment brightly witty social comedy, the next fraught family drama. A few of these hairpin turns are too sharp for anyone to negotiate smoothly, but Arciniegas and his strong, engaging actors mostly keep things rolling effortlessly along.

Tom O'Keefe, newly returned to Boston after a decade in LA, plays the awkward, stuttering astrophysicist at the center of the action. Felix Humble leaves his academic research for his beekeeping father's funeral and, once home, uncovers a veritable hive of activity around his mother, the queen bee: She's having a secret affair with their boorish neighbor; a young woman Felix once loved reenters the picture; and Felix himself is having trouble letting go of his father's memory. All "Hamlet" allusions and beekeeping metaphors are strictly Jones's own.

Stephanie Clayman makes the mother, Flora, a fascinating monster: stunningly self-absorbed, yet with a hidden knack for insight that emerges, unexpectedly but believably, late in the game. Nigel Gore has a blast as the oafish but devoted neighbor, George Pye, and British newcomer Claire Warden brings a passionate inner strength to the ex-girlfriend, Rosie. Faced with these outsize personalities, bumbling Felix sometimes disappears into himself, but O'Keefe mostly holds his own - even when the script requires him to provide thick, and thickly metaphorical, chunks of detail about string theory and black holes.

It's the characters at the edge of the action, though, who may be most worth watching: not just Warden's Rosie but the mousy, hilarious Mercy, an acolyte of Flora's who seems to have been written expressly for Nancy E. Carroll's comedic gifts, and the quiet, thoughtful gardener, Jim, who in Dafydd Rees's unobtrusively alert performance takes on a uniquely pleasing and appropriate gravitas. Jones calls for as much subtlety in these parts as she does showiness in the central ones, and every actor responds.

Jones also delivers more twists than a pretzel factory, but only one really relies too heavily on out-of-character coincidence to come off. For the most part, the playwright's evident intelligence and good humor make us content to go along for the ride. It's also a pleasure to see such a handsome production in the sometimes difficult Plaza Theatre space, with a lovingly detailed garden set by Dahlia Al-Habieli that's attractively dappled by Jeff Adelberg's lighting, spot-on English eccentric costumes pulled together by Susanne Nitter, and apt, appealing music contributed by Simon Slater.

"Humble Boy" is not flawless. It's sometimes too talky, too pleased with its intelligence, and too overplotted for that. At its best, it gives us an eccentric but appealing cast of characters, a satisfying depth of relationships, and a winning ability to use words in the service of complex emotions. That's pretty sweet.