Walt Wingfield returns to Rosebud

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Wingfield on Ice, the fifth play in the comedy series about stockbroker-turned-farmer Walt Wingfield, appeared at Rosebud Opera House, Feb. 23-25.
“Wingfield on Ice covers the big issues in life, including birth and death,” said Rod Beattie, who performs all the characters in the show.
At the end of the previous episode, performed in Rosebud a year ago, Walt learned he’s going to become a father.
He starts this year’s show by talking about ice, Beattie said, “meaning the feelings that freeze people’s hearts against one another.”
“Walt … feels that he’s bringing life into the world and it should be into a garden,” Beattie said.
But Walt has discovered there’s long-standing conflict within many of the homes along his rural road.
“So he decides to address these old feuds and long-held grudges – and, as usual with Walt, he gets a disproportionate whack up the side of the head for this,” said Beattie.
Then another kind of ice arrives.
“There’s an ice storm that hits and debilitates Persephone Township,” Beattie said. “Pretty well the same way that the 1998 ice storm did in Eastern Ontario and Quebec, and in fact we used a lot of history from that ice storm in the play.
“There is a conflict involving Walt’s very good friend, the Squire, across the road, which Walt doesn’t learn about until this play.”
That conflict gets resolved, but not without cost.
“The effects of people’s hearts being frozen against each other may eventually be ameliorated, but time is lost and it can’t be retrieved,” he said. “There’s kind of a bittersweet note about that.”
There’s wisdom in the story too, Beattie said, and it might be from an unexpected source.
One Canadian artistic director had said he didn’t fully understand what happened in Wingfield on Ice, Beattie said, until the character of Walt’s wife, Maggie, explained it to him.
“Maggie is a very wise young woman, but she also has the country people’s wisdom,” he said, “not the city people’s wisdom. And it makes a difference.
“For many people, this is one of their favourites [of the Wingfield shows]. There are a lot of very moving stories in this play, and they happen to be funny at the same time.”