Walt Wingfield returns to Rosebud

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Wingfield Unbound, a one-man comedy about the misadventures of stockbroker-turned-farmer Walt Wingfield, comes to Rosebud’s Opera House, March 17 to 19.
“This play starts with Walt and Maggie. They’ve just come back from their honeymoon,” said Rod Beattie, who plays Walt Wingfield, his wife Maggie, and all their friends and foes. “Walt is still going two days into the city to work at the brokerage firm because he has to do that to support his farming habit.”
This is Beattie’s fourth time bringing Wingfield to Rosebud, having previously performed Letter from Wingfield Farm, Wingfield’s Progress and Wingfield’s Folly, all written by Dan Needles.
“We originally intended that to be the whole thing and the marriage of Walt and Maggie was kind of the end of the cycle,” Beattie said. “But what we discovered, after about five years, was that while we may have thought that, the characters didn’t seem to think that. And they woke up one day with other stories to tell and they said deal with it. And so we buckled down and wrote them.”
Wingfield Unbound “represents quite a new departure for Walt and for the story,” Beattie said. “It’s our first foray into the world of the paranormal. It’s kind of the Wingfield version of the X-Files. Walt decides that he wants to preserve the heritage of the community by converting the Hollyhock Mill into a museum, and he doesn’t realize that the locals know, or think they know, that it’s haunted … Walt, of course, doesn’t believe this, and he sets out to prove them wrong. And he immediately runs into a lot of trouble.”
Beattie uses small but distinctive differences in speech, gesture, and facial expression to distinguish the performances of Walt and his fellow characters. Those of us who aren’t actors may wonder how he keeps them straight.
“You try to feel the way it feels to be that person,” he explained. “Once you have switched to that person, then that person is a whole entity with voice and body, and how they feel in their middle, and how they feel in their extremities … we (actors) have people running around inside us that we play. It’s just a matter of bringing it out.”
Beattie has had these people “running around inside of him” for more than 30 years, since he began performing Wingfield’s stories across Canada and in the U.S. in the mid-1980s. Why do people keep coming back?
“People get interested in the characters and in their stories,” he said. “It’s like the appeal of the soap opera in a way, and they want to tune in and see what happens next. There are always new developments and new characters and Walt always learns a new thing and the audience does too.”
Beattie will give four matinee and evening performances of Wingfield Unbound in Rosebud’s Opera House, March 17 to 19. Each performance includes a buffet meal. You can get tickets at rosebudtheatre.com or 1-800-267-7553.