Remember Walt Wingfield? (No relation to Tennessee Williams' Wingfield family made famous in The Glass Menagerie.) Walt is the hero of a series of shaggy Ontario tales about a businessman-turned-inept farmer. Playhouse audiences met him in 1994 as Rod Beattie performed the first of three one-man shows, The Wingfield Trilogy.

        Walt returns to the Playhouse for a two-week run starting Tuesday. In Wingfield Unbound, recently married Walt decides to help save the community's heritage by establishing a museum in a local mill widely considered to be haunted.

        Along with Walt, Mr. Beattie plays everyone else, too, an entire town filled with endearing eccentrics.

        “I'm actually not sure how many characters I play,” he muses. “The Town Council is back by popular demand.”

        He's particularly fond of Unbound. “With each play, Walt learns something that changes his life somehow,” Mr. Beattie ruminates. “Problems get resolved in unexpected ways. In this one, Walt is pro-active and Walt learns to live with faith in the unseen. "Hope is not hope which can be seen.' Unbound is about acceptance.”

        Mr. Beattie has been playing Walt Wingfield and his friends and neighbors for 17 years now, not a bad run for something that started as “a lark.”

        In fact, there were only supposed to be the original three plays, “but the characters didn't think that.” Five years after the third episode premiered, “there were other issues and other stories to tell.”

        Unbound premiered in 1997; Wingfield on Ice debuted in 2001. But that's another story.

        The Wingfield plays are primarily written by Canadian Dan Needles, based on his experiences as a playful fiction columnist for an Ontario newspaper. But they are also a group effort.

        Mr. Needles, Mr. Beattie and his brother, director Douglas Beattie, are lifelong friends, and it was the Beatties who envisioned the newspaper column as a play — specifically a solo performance piece.

        Mr. Beattie spends alternating years as a member of the ensemble of the Stratford Festival. But he remains content to devote himself to the Wingfield chronicles every other year. “It's a luxury you don't often get in this business, exploring a community.

        “If you're a character actor, it's a lot of fun having a repertoire of characters who are interesting and amusing and who surprise you. I've spent a lot of time in that place — and it's a good place to be.”

        Wingfield Unbound continues through July 14. (No performance Thursday). 421-3888.

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