By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Please note: It is summer on Golden Pond.
The loons are calling, and the black flies hatching.
Norman and Ethel Thayer have returned for their 48th year to summer on this idyllic lake in rural Maine.
Ethel is elated to be there. To spend another summer wiling way the time picking berries, lolling by the lake, and playing board games in the evening.
Unfortunately Norman’s mood is far from sunny. It better matches the kind of weather we’ve been experiencing hereabouts lately. His idea for conversation is pondering self-cremation in the fireplace, albeit immolation with style as he does a back flip into the flames.
Ethel (Fran Martone) greets Bill (Tom Edge), as Chelsea (Stephanie Truman) looks on.
The Black Swamp Players, who at 50 have been a going concern two years longer than the Thayers’ marriage, are staging Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond,” to conclude their own golden anniversary season. The show opens Friday, April 20, and runs weekends through Sunday, April 29 at the First United Methodist Church, 1526 E. Wooster St., Bowling Green. Click for further details. http://www.blackswampplayers.org/
While Norman (Bob Welly) contemplates his demise, Ethel (Fran Martone) is in denial. She insists they are still middle-age, maybe “the far-edge of middle age.” This is the summer Norman turns 80. Ethel is 10 years younger. Welly and Martone make for a fine couple. They exude a bond even when they are bickering. Their relationship still has flickers of the young, romantic spark that refuses to be extinguished.
Norman’s concerns are not imaginary. He suffers from memory loss and heart palpitations, the typical theatrical maladies of old age.
These are played for laughs, and as someone just on the near edge of aging, there’s plenty of laughter from self-recognition.
When he goes out, really sent out by a frustrated Ethel, to pick strawberries, he becomes confused. He returns, his bluster gone. He just wants to be back with Ethel, and the safety of her presence.
Ethel would like the presence of their daughter Chelsea (Stephanie King Truman), who hasn’t been back to the pond for eight years.
If not for her mother, she’d be estranged from her father. She was never the son he wanted, nor the daughter really. She never had children. Norman asks Ethel if she ever had that talk with her. Or maybe he should have had that talk with her ex-husband. Though when pressed, he can’t imagine much they’d do with a grandchild.
Gavin Miller plays Billy Jr.
This is the summer that Chelsea returns with her latest boyfriend, Bill Ray (Thomas Edge), a dentist. They arrive on their way to Europe with Bill’s son Billy Jr. (Gavin Miller) in tow.
Edge has one big scene where he faces off with Norman, who is disinclined to engage in any kind of conversation. Having failed to establish rapport, Bill must awkwardly broach the subject of sleeping arrangements for him and Chelsea. Norman pounces on his uncertainly, pushing the conversation into queries about sex, and whether that’s appropriate. We never really know if Norman cares or not about whether they sleep together. But it is clear he cares about keeping Bill off-balance and at a distance.
Bill stands up for himself in a monologue flecked with the psychobabble of the 1970s. His son Billy’s slang also smacks of the 1970s. Miller is convincing as a “Valley boy,” convincing in a role steeped in the culture from the past century.
Billy, who ends up staying with the Thayers at Golden Pond, becomes a surrogate grandson, or maybe the son, Norman never had. He sparks something in Norman, and in him Norman finds a willing student to whom he can introduce classic adventure stories, and whose French he can correct. Ethel revels in having Chelsea back even for a short time.
Truman signals from her first entrance Chelsea’s discomfort being in the presence of her father. She tells her mother that for all her assuredness elsewhere “this house makes me feel like a fat little girl.”
Truman makes the audience feel that vulnerability as she tries to find some crack in her father’s craggy demeanor.
Charlie (Lane Hakel), center, has coffee and biscuits with Ethel (Fran Martone) and Norman (Bob Welly).
She has more fun when Charlie (Lane Hakel) the mailman arrives. They were an item for many summers, but Norman objected to their marrying. Their relationship shades the plot with more melancholy. We really are cheering for Charlie and share his disappointment that Chelsea is hooked up with Bill, whose main attraction is his bland, stolid nature.
Hakel has fun with the local character role. Certainly he brightens Ethel’s days, and even Norman’s as much as the old man would never admit it.
The playwright does well to embed the rhythm of the summer into the script. We feel the time passing of time as the strawberries give way to raspberries and as black flies give way to mosquitos, and then moths. As Ethel and Norman prepare to leave at the end of the play she says this early fall is her favorite time. No bugs.
Well, we will to have to put up with mosquitoes at some point, but it’ll have to get warm first.
Spending a few hours “On Golden Pond” with the Thayers is a delightful diversion as we creep, ever so slowly toward summer.
