Burnett helps find Wilder’s true `North’
In his unfinished, unpublished preface to Theophilus North, his final novel, Thornton Wilder wondered what we humans do with our ``despair, rage and frustration.'' He considered North, which was published in 1973, to be precisely about our battle against the worst things that life throws at us.That battle courses through Wilder's work, whether it's one of his plays (Our Town) or one of his novels (The Bridge of San Luis Rey).Early in his career, Wilder summed up his work to then, and his assessment proved true for most of what was to follow: ``It seems to me that my books are about: What's the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it.''In Theophilus North, published when Wilder was 76, two years before his death, Wilder offered a somewhat autobiographical title character who was both aimless and ambitious, anxious to find his place in the world and to be of service.Theophilus (who bears the same name as Wilder's twin, who died shortly after birth), is stuck in Newport, R.I., and ends up working odd jobs for the town's wealthy inhabitants and the less wealthy people who serve them.
He's not unlike Dolly Levi in Wilder's The Matchmaker, who ends up meddling and changing people's lives.The story of Theophilus grabbed hold of Matthew Burnett, also aimless and ambitious, almost by chance and ended up changing the young actor's life. His stage version of the novel has its West Coast premiere Saturday in a TheatreWorks production at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.Having reached a sort of post-college sand bar that had waylaid his own voyage through life, a 23-year-old Burnett ended up back at his old high school in Calabasas chatting with the teacher who had directed him in a production of Our Town. The teacher recommended the young man read Theophilus North.
``I started to read the book and was dumbfounded,'' Burnett says from his New York City home. ``It became apparent to me within 30 pages that this novel would be a great play. It just had to be a play. At that point I was thinking about it as an actor. I was Theophilus. I figured I'd write the play for myself.''Years passed, and by the time Burnett was at the point where he could actually begin to seriously turn the novel into a play, he was too old to play the 30-year-old North.``It's just as well,'' he says. ``If I was going to write this, I needed to be able to separate myself and see what's working, what isn't.''Before Burnett began to write in earnest, he contacted the Wilder estate, which was then run by Wilder's sister, Isobel. The response from the estate was pretty much, ``No thank you very much.''A heartbroken Burnett couldn't be dissuaded. He decided if he couldn't write the play as a viable project, he'd write it for the love of doing it.
For several years, in between acting gigs, Burnett would sit on the roof of his Brooklyn building and turn Theophilus North from a nearly 400-page novel into a two-hour play.When he actually had a working script and had actor friends read it in a sort of living room workshop scenario, he decided to make a serious move: He hired a literary agent.``I knew I had no credibility as a writer, but through the agent we contacted the Wilder estate again, which was by this time run by Thornton's nephew, Tappan Wilder,'' Burnett says.One night Burnett's phone rang, and it was Tappan Wilder. Burnett recalls Wilder saying: ``You know, we don't ever give rights to these things, but I'm intrigued by the work you've done and who you are and why you've done this.''Burnett and Wilder met in New York at the Yale Club, and at the end of the night a deal was struck.``Tappan said to me: `I like you and think you've done a good job. I say yes.' He shook my hand. I don't know what I did for the next three hours or how I got home or any of it,'' Burnett says.Theophilus North, the play, had its world premiere in 2003 as a co-production between the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and Geva Theater Center in Rochester, N.Y., and it was produced again last year off-Broadway.The novel is episodic, as Theophilus makes his way through Newport, helping here, teaching there and affecting lives everywhere. Burnett's job as a dramatist was to give Theophilus a more dramatic arc and emphasize that although he's a bright man with a wealth of factual knowledge, he still has a lot to learn about the world.