The Winnipesaukee Playhouse, in Weirs Beach, has opened its new production of Theophilus North.
It's an adaptation of Thorton Wilder's semi-autobiographical novel.
NHPR's Theatre Critic Kevin Gardner has this review.
New Hampshire theatre-goers encounter Thornton Wilder almost exclusively through his classic 1938 drama Our Town.
But Wilder was a prolific novelist as well as a playwright.
Theophilus North is his last full-length work.
It’s the fictionalized account of a summer the young Wilder spent in Newport Rhode Island in 1926, not long before he began his career as one of America’s most original and beloved writers.
Loosely adapted for the stage by playwright Matthew Burnett, Theophilus North is receiving its New England premier at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Weirs Beach.
The production simultaneously showcases the strengths and weaknesses of Burnett’s earnest but undisciplined script.
At its best, the play provides a fascinating glimpse at Wilder’s artistic and philosophical origins.
At its worst, it’s second-hand Wilder.
It liberally borrows the older playwright’s theatrical tools, but it has none of Wilder’s economy or his gift for characterization.
Theophilus North is nearly plotless.
The title character, a young schoolteacher, decides to escape his predictable life.
He buys a car and takes off for Anywhere, searching partly for adventure and mostly for himself.
But the car breaks down in Newport, and he’s stuck.
He takes a series of jobs in the wealthy households of the old seaside resort, becoming a kind of freelance confidant to both the moneyed and the servant classes.
As the summer ends, he achieves a revelation: he’s meant to be a writer.
The Winnipesaukee Playhouse puts all this across in high style and with considerable skill.
Under Bryan Halperin’s brisk , imaginative direction, his nine-member cast plays more than twenty roles, including cars, buildings, and ferry-boats as well as an assortment of human beings.
Effortlessly shape-shifting from character to character all night long, they also provide live sound effects from behind semi-transparent screens in David Utz Towland’s marvelous set.
That set is a star of this show.
It’s a superb reproduction of a small 1920’s theater, so beautifully integrated in the Winni Playhouse’s storefront space that it looks like original architecture.
Josh Odsess-Rubin leads the way in the title role with an exuberance that borders on mania at times.
The play makes Theophilus North the MC of his own life, constantly stepping outside scenes to comment on them even as they unfold, and Odsess-Rubin is more than up to this task.
His energy never falters, but he’s less successful at balancing Theophilus’s longing for connection with his essential detachment.
As a result, he seems a kind of social ringmaster without much of an interior life, and his climactic revelation looks a little formulaic.
And that’s the essence of Burnett’s play.
Despite the Winnipesaukee company’s best efforts – and they are admirable – Theophilus North plays like an imitation.
Fans of Thornton Wilder’s mature work will recognize many things.
It’s got the invisible props, the free flow of scenes and characters, the narrative direct-address, the appeal to an indifferent but benignly humanist cosmology.
But Burnett fails to transform his sources into something that stands on its own.
Theophilus North will run at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse through July 19th.
It’s a fine chance to see one of New Hampshire’s most promising young summer theatre companies step off the beaten path with a lovely and well-acted production.
And it will remind you, perhaps inadvertently, what a great play Our Town really is.
For NHPR news, I’m Kevin Gardner.
