Janet-Laine Green and Benedict Campbell in On Golden Pond.Courtesy of Drayton Entertainment
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- Title: On Golden Pond
- Written by: Ernest Thompson
- Director: Marti Maraden
- Actors: Benedict Campbell, Janet-Laine Green
- Company: Drayton Entertainment
- Venue: Hamilton Family Theatre Cambridge (to Aug. 6); King’s Wharf Theatre (Aug. 11 to 28)
- City: Cambridge, Ont.; then Penetanguishene, Ont.
- COVID-19 measures: Limited capacity/proof of vaccination performances available.
Critic’s Pick
The long dramatic pause of the pandemic has not only allowed theatre companies a chance to rethink what they do, but for audiences to examine and change their own long-ingrained habits.
It’s a well-established custom, for instance, that this newspaper’s Toronto-based theatre critic takes off in the summer to review the seasons at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival, but only drives past the various venues that house the southern Ontario circuit known as Drayton Entertainment even though it employs much of the same talent.
I decided I should try switching up that routine this year, and so made a pit stop en route to Stratford to check out On Golden Pond, now on stage at Drayton’s Hamilton Family Theatre Cambridge (in Cambridge, not Hamilton) and headed to the King’s Wharf Theatre in Penetanguishene on August 11.
I’m glad that I did. Marti Maraden, who spent 18 seasons with the Stratford Festival as an actor and director (and who even ran it as part of a trio of artistic directors for a year), has put together a strong production of this 1978 American dramatic comedy that would fit in seamlessly at either of Ontario’s big repertory companies in terms of production values.
The play, by Ernest Thompson, takes place at a cottage on a Maine lake called Golden Pond. It’s well known because of its Oscar-winning 1981 film adaptation, in which Henry Fonda made his final big-screen appearance alongside his daughter, Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn.
Benedict Campbell, who spent 14 seasons as a leading man at the Shaw Festival, takes on the elder Fonda’s role here, that of Norman Thayer, Jr. – a curmudgeonly retired professor on the cusp of 80 whose hobbies including big-bass fishing, bullying friends and family, and bigotry. It’s a role that Campbell, though a tad young for the part, fills beautifully with restrained bluster.
Janet-Laine Green co-stars as Ethel, Norman’s long-suffering wife, a decade younger and increasingly taking on the role of caretaker to her husband. The first scene is an atmospheric one between the aging couple, mostly just showing them setting up the cottage for the season and establishing that Norman’s memory has begun to go through a play-starting one-sided phone conversation (a stage convention that apparently didn’t die with Noel Coward).
On Golden Pond never exactly becomes plot-heavy after that. The Thayers are semi-estranged from their daughter Chelsea (Stacy Smith), who is divorced and, in her early 40s, beginning a relationship with a dentist named Bill (Cyrus Lane, drilling deep into a small role) who has a teenage son, Billy (Evan Kearns).
The arrival of these other characters takes place at its own particular pace – and there’s something lovely in the way Thompson takes detours both comic and dramatic, and embraces an honest and humanistic portrayal of how people genuinely interact (a minor misstep or two in the writing aside).
Thompson wrote this play, his first and only big hit, at age 28, while his acting career was in a lull, and it’s an example of how attractive untutored playwriting can be. One act is mainly taken up by a fairly uneventful visit from the local odd-duck mailman (Justin Bott), but it all works as directed with unhurried confidence by Maraden, whose well of experience with the works of Anton Chekhov (and David Storey) is apparent here.
There’s a twilight of an era sensibility to On Golden Pond that aligns not only with Chekhov’s plays, but also with the American era it was written in – the one that would soon elect Ronald Reagan as president.
You could certainly criticize the play for the way no one pushes back against Norman’s more odious views from within it, but you might equally appreciate the fact that Thompson refused to ignore the monocultural “charms” of New England cottage country in his depiction. (It apparently can work without monocultural casting, too: On Golden Pond’s most recent Broadway revival starred James Earl Jones Jr., and the legendary Canadian Black actor Walter Borden just played Norman at the Victoria Playhouse Petrolia.)
I found the play – which I had never seen despite its frequent production at summer theatres – most powerful in a hilarious scene of comic needling, unexpectedly undercut (Campbell and Lane knock this out of the park), and in its dramatization of an undramatic truth: Reconciliation in families doesn’t always come after a big showdown, but is mostly a matter of the younger generation quietly recognizing that they now hold the reins.
While Drayton Entertainment is a not-for-profit company, it has neither sought nor received operating funding from the Ontario Arts Council or the Canada Council for the Arts since its founding in 1991. The enterprise is therefore very loyal to its audiences, concentrated in smaller centres across Ontario, and its audiences have likewise been loyal to it by donating during the period that it had to keep doors closed.
To get through the past two years, chief executive officer and artistic director Alex Mustakas utilized not just the federal wage subsidy but drew down on the rainy day fund he’d been paying into for 30 years. He’s now producing a 2022 season on about half of the budget he usually does and expecting audiences to return at about 20 to 25 per cent of their usual level. (In the years leading up the pandemic, Drayton attracted about 250,000 a year to its seven stages in six venues located in five Ontario communities.)
Mustakas has often told me, adopting a folksy manner, about how his affordable, accessible theatre circuit grows audiences on its diet of mostly revues, comedies and musicals. Those theatregoers then tell him that they went “down the road” and tried out a Shakespeare play at the Stratford Festival. But there’s no reason folks can’t drive the other way down that road. They won’t be disappointed if they do in this case.
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