Theater: ‘On Golden Pond’ at Bucks County Playhouse
By Ted Otten | For The Times of Trenton
on July 15, 2015 at 7:00 AM, updated July 15, 2015 at 7:08 AM
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Traditions, like Ethel and Norman Thayer spending their summers at their cottage on Golden Pond in Maine, are sometimes abandoned or altered by the forces of both man and nature as the lead characters in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond,” directed by Jonathan Silverstein, now playing at New Hope’s Bucks County Playhouse through August 2, discover during the five months that it takes this touching play to happen.
Norman retired not long ago from his teaching job at a university, a job that allowed the Thayers the luxury of their long summer holidays, but Norman is getting on in years and some things about daily life are more difficult and troublesome than they used to be. Many of his contemporaries and colleagues have passed away, and he no longer has the intellectual stimulation of the classroom. Fortunately, he has Ethel, a patient and understanding wife. Although the couple had lost contact with their only daughter Chelsea, she suddenly arrives with her fiancé and his precocious son. For many reasons, this year’s vacation will be different whether they want those changes or not.
Playing the Thayers in New Hope are real-life married couple Mia Dillon and Keir Dullea who have worked both separately and together before and after their marriage in 1999 on stage and screen although they much prefer working together these days especially with roles like the Thayers being offered to them.
Both actors have local connections. Dullea attended the George School in Newtown and spoke highly of their theatre department which he said was where his first inklings of becoming an actor began. Dillon graduated from Marple-Newtown Senior High in Newtown Square, but they didn’t meet until they both appeared in a play directed by Dullea’s wife, Suzie Fuller, who died in 1998.
Since the play is new to them, Dillon and Dullea appreciated the fact that they were constantly together beyond the all-too-brief time of their stage rehearsals and could discuss their characters whenever a new idea came to them although Dullea credits director Silverstein with many insights into the complex character who is Norman Thayer.
“If you need a classification for this play, I’d say it’s a serious comedy, but Norman has far more depth, deeper recesses, more corners than most comedy characters have. He has the kind of wit that some people find caustic, and often his attitude is taken far too seriously by others,” said Dullea who is only a year younger than the character he plays but has not experienced Norman’s problems with memory loss and disorientation.
“Norman is a little harder to live with than Keir,” said Dillon who spoke while Dullea was deciding his answer to the difficult question, “Do you like Norman as a person?”
Dullea isn’t sure he likes Norman, but he respects him, and Dullea said, “Norman uses intellectual things like puns and word play as a smoke screen because Norman is a man who doesn’t show his real emotions very often. Perhaps he isn’t comfortable with them. Chelsea is not at all like her father in that way, and this is part of their incompatibility and why they have been out of contact all these years.”
Dillon sees Ethel as a compassionate and practical woman who’s more aware and more intelligent than most people, perhaps including Norman, have realized.
“Norman teases because he cares,” said Dillion, “and Ethel has learned to accept that approach and live with it, but Chelsea is different from her mother. Some people choose to show love by teasing, and Norman is one of those people. But that can be a tricky thing. It can be very funny to a third person or a bystander, but it may be heard as being cruel by the person to whom it is directed.
“Ethel’s mother-daughter relationship with Chelsea is not that of best friends, and I don’t think that Ethel realizes how hurt Chelsea has been and how often by Norman’s teasing and his remarks that Chelsea perceives as being cutting. Ethel would have a more practical outlook on things and say ‘Get over it!’ and mean it , not in a frivolous way but in a way that shows her practicality and that she realizes that people have to just pick up and get on with their lives.”
Both Dillon and Dullea are enthusiastic about Thompson’s play, but they harbor a desire to return to the Tennessee Williams’ classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” They recently did a revival at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in which Dullea, who had played Brick in the play’s first Broadway revival in 1974, played the commanding Big Daddy and Dillon played his long suffering wife, Big Mama Pollitt.
“On Broadway with Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie the Cat, I had a superb example of characterization by Fred Gwynne who played Big Daddy. It’s such a shame that people remember him only as Herman Munster, but he was a meticulous, classically trained actor who dug into his characterization with both hands because he saw that the character was worth probing,” said Dullea.
“I think Norman is that kind of character too.”
IF YOU GO
“On Golden Pond”
Where: Bucks County Playhouse, 70 South Main Street, New Hope, Pa.
When: through August 2; Tuesday & Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.
How much: Tickets are $29 – $85.
Contact: 215-862-2121 or online at .
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