These not-so-happy golden years
Published 10:32 am Monday, March 3, 2008
The golden years aren’t always so golden.
Lest you think Village is all song and dance, each year’s lineup of productions does include a drama. And this year’s is particularly interesting in that it signals the aspirations of the folks in Issaquah to provide audiences with better and better theater. Whether they are extending their reach a little too far beyond their grasp, that is the question. In this reviewer’s opinion, they just might be.
The drama is Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond,” a perennial favorite, from which audiences can expect a pretty picture of a cute, fairly well adjusted, senior couple negotiating the vicissitudes of advancing age. That is “Pond’s” reputation. That is what Village lives up to and no more. And that is what there is nothing original in.
This is not to say the production falls flat on its face, far from it.
Village probably spared no expense to get Clayton and Susan Corzatte to star as Norman and Ethel Thayer. This is a Tony Award-nominated husband-and-wife team bringing their skill and their real-life marital experience to roles that approximate their time of life. The result is a sort of gentle, kindly, thoughtful, interdependent, oftentimes humorous give-and-take. It is old age idealized but intended to be so and comforting to watch, like the way a pair of old slippers fit together.
On the other hand, if this “Pond” knows where marriage in the twilight years is supposed to go and gets there, it also knows where the second principal relationship is supposed to go and doesn’t.
The second relationship is the unresolved stand off between Norman as father and Chelsea as his adult daughter.
Chelsea as played by Jeanne Paulsen makes no secret from early on that she is not the son her father hoped for. Right or wrong doesn’t matter. She is convinced and tormented believing the clock is ticking and her father will go to his grave disappointed that his daughter isn’t his son. This belief is announced again and again and is only finally resolved when she tells her father and he says not so. The buildup promises gut-wrenching drama. The resolution delivers a pat on the back with a there, there, everything’s fine. It’s a hardly a god’s in his heaven, all is right with the world.
Michael Moore and Clayton Corzatte together make a completely entertaining portrait of a grandson and a grandfather coming to mutually satisfying terms as well as in modern terms.
A stand out scene has Jim Gall asking Norman if he can sleep in the same bed with Norman’s daughter although they are not married. Gall’s sincerity textured against Norman’s playing with him is the very essence of cat and mouse. No one watching can possibly keep a straight face.
And Eric Ray Anderson’s slow-thinking, goodhearted Charlie Martin, the mailman, adds a bright, light touch.
Given the scope of “Pond,” director Jeff Steitzer might have more fully developed the Norman-Chelsea relationship. Given the datedness of “Pond,” Steitzer might have updated the relationship between Norman and Ethel, added something of today’s view of life in the slowing-down lane. But see for yourself.
