Sassy Stoic

By T.E.K.

ON GOLDEN POND

by Ernest Thompson

The first thing one hears is the cry of birds. A solitary figure shuffles in like a molting heron wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He is Norman Thayer Jr. (Tom Aldredge), hater of the New York Yankees, high dental fees and, most of all, the thought of turning 80. For 48 years, Norman and his wife Ethel (Frances Sternhagen) have summered at their Maine cottage on Golden Pond.

Too gentle to rage against the dying of the light, Norman goes in for a good sassy snarl. Rather like the father in "Da," he is one of those curmudgeons you grow fond of simply because he is so deadpan funny. But his sarcastic bark is a stoic camouflage for his losing bite on life. In one affecting scene, Norman goes out to pick strawberries and returns shortly with an empty pail. A memory lapse has prevented him from recognizing the old path and reduced him to a frightened child seeking the solace of a familiar face.

Frances Sternhagen's Ethel is more than a comforter. She is a diminutive fortress of a woman. Brave, resilient, compassionate, she has spent a lifetime taming and pampering her paper lion. But with all that, she cannot seem to restore Norman's faltering appetite for living. In his first Broadway play, Ernest Thomp son, 29, soundly realizes that it takes young blood to send old blood coursing.

Young blood is in the wings. The Thayers' long absent and somewhat alienated daughter (Barbara Andres) arrives with her current lover, a divorced dentist (Stan Lachow), and, more important, the dentist's 13-year-old son Billy (Mark Bendo). Billy is parked with the Thayers for a few weeks, and Norman takes a shine to the kid. He teaches him how to fish, and Billy, a bit of a smartass, brushes up Norman's archaic lingo with such modernisms as "suckface" for "to kiss." A brush with death further restores Norman's zest for life and schools Ethel in the sweet scary brevity of it.

The luminous performances of Aldredge and Sternhagen make the price of a theater ticket seem paltry. This is the kind of acting that goes into the memory bank of treasured theatrical experiences. Director Craig Anderson never inflates the modest human scale and substance of the work. On Golden Pond makes hearts float and leaves playgoers, in the words of one of Marianne Moore's poems, "strengthened to live."

-- T.E.K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.