Sprawling and unwieldy, with dozens of characters orbiting around its young hero, Thornton Wilder’s last novel, Theophilus North, would seem an unpromising candidate for stage adaptation. Yet first-time playwright Matthew Burnett, whose “Theophilus North” opened last night in a competent production by the Keen Company, excavates the Wilder play buried in the novel. Mr. Burnett’s adaptation could be leaner, but it gets the spirit right: This “Theophilus North” is unmistakably a cousin of “Our Town.”

Like the Stage Manager before him, Theophilus North directly addresses the audience from a nearlybare stage. But this time the setting is 1920s Newport, Rhode Island, where Theophilus’s old jalopy breaks down, stranding him in a resort town run by the rich. We’re a long way from Grover’s Corners; Newport is decidedly their town, not ours.

Theophilus, a son of the American meritocracy, occupies a curious middle-ground in Newport. He comes from plain folk in Wisconsin, but he’s been to Yale; he may live at the YMCA, but he speaks several languages. And though he may be a servant, he enters Newport’s mansions through their front doors.

As played by Giorgio Litt (in his New York debut), the 30-year-old Theophilus is as quaint and set in his ways as an old man. A bespectacled nerd in a mediocre suit, he’s utterly preoccupied with the ghosts of history and literature.Theophilus has little use for the physical world. (Hired to teach the kids tennis, he learns it from a library book.) His speech, littered with grandiose allusions and quotations, makes him a kind of parlor oddity. “You’re like a dictionary come to life,” one local fellow marvels.

Theophilus’s staunch objectivity gives him an asexual air. He’s unthreatening, so the wealthy hire him to teach their children and read to their invalids. But as he moves from mansion to mansion (in brief, continuous scenes reminiscent of a movie), the strictly-business Theophilus starts to lose his sacred objectivity. He begins to care about the people he meets.

Here the material takes a kind of family movie turn. Like Anne of Green Gables, Theophilus reforms everyone he comes into contact with — the conflicted adolescent boy, the miserable wife, the shut-in afraid to step outside. But unlike the high-spirited, plucky Anne, Theophilus is a fuddy-duddy. Even when he’s teaching a boy dirty French phrases, he’s wound up tight.

It’s a tribute to Wilder’s writing (and Mr. Litt’s acting) that this strange, uptight little man is so compelling. Our curiosity is aroused; we want to know what made him this way. The clues come in a second-act subplot, in which Theophilus is hired by a rich girl’s father to stop her from eloping with a local substitute teacher. This poignant sequence (well-played by Virginia Kull and Brian Hutchison) has a more grown-up resonance, for though Theophilus succeeds in breaking up the mismatched couple, he’s tormented by his actions. “Strange,” the girl says to him. “I don’t know you, but because of four hours with you, my life will be different.”

As the substitute teacher points out (supplying an unabashedly onthe-nose metaphor), a catalyst can affect everything around it without changing its own fundamental nature. No matter how many times he makes his circuit through Newport, stopping off at a mansion, a rooming house, a tennis court, Theophilus seems unchanged.The spectacles and the suit are almost a uniform, keeping him at a remove from human contact.

Mr. Forsman’s staging cleverly echoes Theophilus’s peripatetic journey. His wooden stage, equipped only with some basic furniture and an oldfashioned bicycle, suggests different environments by various means: wonderful ambient audio fill by Daniel Baker, evocative costumes by Theresa Squire, and a fare amount of miming.

“Theophilus North” earns high marks for imagination, but remains in the end a kind of timeworn paean to a bygone way of looking at the world. In this, it is true to Wilder. Even in his own time, there were those who thought Wilder sentimental, and “Theophilus North” is undoubtedly tinged with old-time nostalgia.

But there are muscles rippling under the play’s rose-scented skin. Right through his last moment on stage, Theophilus is a contrary character, too shrewd to settle for fine poetry, too full of romantic yearning to make peace with mere ordinary life.

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