BRUNSWICK – “Secret Lives of Walter Mitty and The Appleton Twins,” a wacky, family-friendly play (unless your family is never wacky), is being staged at The Theater Project through Sunday, May 17.
That’s how Theater Project Artistic Director Al Miller describes the show he created.
The idea came to him when he and Executive Director Wendy Poole were discussing the spring company show. Two scripts that Miller was particularly interested in weren’t available and others he’d looked at didn’t interest him.
“Then it hit me,” he said. “A family show, good for adults and young people, using the writings of the late New Yorker great James Thurber and local creative genius Calef Brown.”
Gary Lawless of Gulf of Maine Books had shown Miller one of Brown’s books a few years ago and told him that Brown, who was then living in California, came to Brunswick in the summer. “I told Gary I’d love to meet him and then he moved here and I did. Not only that, but I then realized I was working with his mother, Lolly Brown, in The Center Stage Players. Small world.”
“Thurber wrote very playful sketches for a very sophisticated magazine and is no longer with us. Calef writes and illustrates very playful sketches for a very broad audience today,” Miller said. “Both comment on their society in humorous ways. One was a New Yorker, the other is now a Mainer – ‘a Brunswicker.’ Past and present, big city and local, wry and witty, both of them.”
Miller and Poole began brainstorming the show and soon were joined by scenic designer Christopher Price and lighting designer JP Gagnon.
The set is designed to look like a set of building blocks dumped on the floor, which the actors use to create new visual effects as the show progresses; and Brown’s vivid artwork is projected throughout the show.
Cast members are Elliott Cumming, Craig Ela, Michele Livermore Wigton and Heather Weafer, joined by musician Jim Hall as a one-man band on stage. All four are veteran Theater Project actors, with Wigton and Weafer last seen in last May’s “Steel Magnolias,” and Cumming an audience favorite as The Tin Man in “OZ: Revisiting the Wizard.”
Show times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 1 and 4 p.m. Sunday. Suggested ticket price is $18, but all tickets are pay what you want. For tickets, call 729-8584, go online to www.theaterproject.com or visit the box office at 14 School St.