DAN NEEDLES
What: Wingfield’s Progress Where: Theatre Aquarius, 190 King William St.
When: Jan. 10, 11 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $60 (fundraiser), 905522-7529 or theatreaquarius.org
had that honour. But after one shot at Walt, he gave up and Beattie made it his own.
Boyhood friends, Needles and Beattie have a symbiotic relationship when it comes to Walt’s success.
“I can’t do anything on my own,” Needles says from his 40-acre Collingwood area farm. “Theatre is such a collaborative process. You have to work together to create someone as loved as Walt Wingfield.”
Growing up in a theatrical family, Dan is the brother of Stratford legend, William Needles. He comes from a theatre family. In the 1940s, his dad starred on a CBC Radio soap, “John and Judy.”
“My grandfather built Massey Hall and my grandmother ran the Canadian Children’s Players at Eaton Auditorium. My roots go deep. In fact, no one in my family really worked for over 70 years. We could afford to swan around community theatre because my mother’s family were bigwigs in Massey-Ferguson,” he says.
“Later, when I went to work for a Toronto insurance company, my family thought the blue suit I wore was a costume.”
Like Walt Wingfield, Dan Needles escaped Toronto’s Bay Street, moving back to rural roots where he felt a sense of community.
Thinking back to his newspaper days, Needles says, “I was a terrible journalist. If I didn’t get the story I wanted I just made it up.”
Fortunately Needles’ mother collected all the Wingfield Farm Letters in a scrapbook. “When I left the paper in 1977 she handed them to me and said, ‘Do something with these.’”
Needles did. Those letters became the first Wingfield script. There have been seven since.
“There’s always a serious kernel at the core of a Wingfield play,” Needles says. “This one’s about urban sprawl, about condos taking over farmland. It’s about losing something important. Walt wants to get out an armoured tank and stop it all.
“These Wingfield plays are snapshots of a time. They’re still worth watching, some of them 30 years later.”
In many ways, they are about bonding and a strong community spirit.
“I bonded with the cattle farmers when I was seven and helping on a farm,” Needles says. “They were the strongest male influence in my life. I admired the way the community worked and played together. There were all these rituals that a vagabond in the theatre like me had never seen.”
According to Needles, “there will be no more Wingfield plays. And the TV series they tried to make of them was a mess; too many meddlers in the middle. The plays work because they don’t have to have a laugh track. They don’t have to be funny every minute. They just need a script, Walt, and lots of smart things to say.”