On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson
Directed by Jane Farnol and featuring Tim Breslin, Dandy Barrett, Rufus de Rham, Stacy-Lee Frome, Jimmy Collins, Jack Hoyt and Lynn Nissenbaum
This is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer, who are returning to their summer home on Golden Pond for the forty-eighth year.
He is a retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing memory—but still as tart-tongued, observant and eager for life as ever. Ethel, ten years younger, and the perfect foil for Norman, delights in all the small things that have enriched and continue to enrich their long life together.
They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiancé, who then go off to Europe, leaving his teenage son behind for the summer. The boy quickly becomes the “grandchild” the elderly couple have longed for, and as Norman revels in taking his ward fishing and thrusting good books at him, he also learns some lessons about modern teenage awareness—and slang—in return. Time, they know, is now against them, but the years have been good and, perhaps, another summer on Golden Pond still awaits.
ON GOLDEN POND premiered on Broadway in 1979 featuring Tom Aldredge and Frances Sternhagen. It was adapted in 1981 as an Oscar winning movie starring Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda. A revival came to Broadway in 2005 with James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggams.