Old folks at home

The iconic 1981 film (with Henry and Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn) hovers in this middle-aged writer’s memory whenever the title On Golden Pond comes up.

But the play came first, in 1979, earning a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. And it’s been a quarter century since the movie premiered. For some viewers—my teenage kids, for instance—it’s a new experience.

Staging the play outdoors, after sundown, is wonderful. The chirping crickets, the harvest moon rising through the oak trees—what better accompaniment for this autumnal family story, set at a summer cabin, in which a dour, old-school patriarch (actor Richard Adams) makes peace with his 42-year-old daughter (Lee Marie Kelley)? The old guy even takes a liking to the daughter’s frisky new stepson (teenager Nick Deegan).

A few scenes feature dated 1970s psychobabble, especially the dialogue between the old man and his prospective stepson (Roman C. Boroquez), and the lines between the family matriarch (Hazel Johnson) and her middle-aged daughter.

But many more scenes feel funny, fresh and surprisingly spontaneous, especially when the curmudgeonly patriarch carries on—while his wife gently dismisses him as an “old poop.”

Director Dean Shellenberger unobtrusively sustains the gentle atmosphere in which lingering family conflicts are gradually (but not artificially) resolved. The ending yields no earth-shaking developments, but you feel appropriately warm and satisfied when you get there.