More than forty years after his death, James Thurber is best remembered for creating “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” The hero retreats from his daily life as a humdrum henpecked Waterbury husband into a romantic fantasy world where he’s the essence of cool. Piloting his prop plane through a gathering hurricane, performing nerve-wracking surgery while repairing a state-of-the-art anesthetizer, and tossing a proffered blindfold defiantly aside to face a firing squad.Nudged along by Danny Kaye’s screen portrayal, Thurber’s Mitty has become a byword for male milquetoasts with extravagant escapist imaginations. Mitty was also the cornerstone of A Thurber Carnival, which flickered briefly for three performances at Theatre Charlotte over the holiday weekend and faded mercifully away.
There’s an alternate Thurber image created by actor William Windom in his Emmy Award television series named after one of his books, My World and Welcome to It. This Thurber husband becomes a reclusive cartoonist who finds solace — and, occasionally, wicked revenge — by depicting his domestic problems in his art.
But despite his genial self-deprecation, the real-life Thurber was neither the wimpy husband nor the reclusive artist.
The true Thurber is subtle and complex, and getting at his essence is more difficult nearly 60 years after the printed Carnival codified the core of his work. Nor does it help when a lightly-regarded musical version of the collection that premiered on Broadway in 1960 is stripped of its music and lyrics and compacted into 65 minutes, including scene changes.
Seniors who went to public school when poetry was still being taught might appreciate Thurber’s upbeat rewrite of “Barbara Frietchie” — and even remember who wrote the original. Otherwise, such cleverness is best savored by literary scholars in 2002. “The Pet Department,” simulating a TV show where a specialist answers viewer questions about their animal friends, should also have been discreetly deposited on the scrap heap.
Directors Dee Abdullah and Allison Modafferi would have been better off resurrecting such Thurber gems as “The Night the Bed Fell” or the widely anthologized “The Catbird Seat.” If you’re going to build up through an entire evening to “Walter Mitty,” there’s no sense whatsoever in lopping off two of the protagonist’s daydreams. And twisting the iconic fable so that it ends happily? Sacrilege!
Having the habitually urbane Joe Copley play Mitty was an interesting touch, though I’m fairly sure Thurber would have preferred the flavoring of Tom Ewell. Copley was even more effective as Thurber in the epistolary “File and Forget” where he strives heroically — but vainly — to fend off shipment after shipment of unordered soft porn books from his own publisher.
Support work for Copley was rather spotty, Deanna Brock’s pallid Mrs. Mitty edging out a couple of strong contenders for the most wretched of the lot. Though implicated in the poem parodies, Caroline Renfro was a poised, stylish narrator most of the time, and Modafferi’s piano provided welcome refreshment. Bob Tully tossed in the Thurberesque set pieces and props. More of this silliness would have been welcome.
Abdullah is Theatre Charlotte’s education guru. If, as I suspect, she recruited heavily from her own students, I’d venture to say that Megan Barrick, Emily Calder, Greg Hoyt, Nick Iammatteo, and Peter Jacobus are among her most promising students.
It was nice to see Abdullah leading off as an actress onstage in “The Wolf at the Door,” with blue chippers Bobby Tyson and John Price. The first of three vignettes from Thurber’s Fables for Our Time launched the evening with as much momentum as the material would allow, but I sorely missed Tyson and Price afterwards. Though they didn’t run for cover, I suspect they were often seriously tempted. I was.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2002.
