Research Through Living: Keir Dullea and Mia Dillon are starring in ‘On Golden Pond’ at the Bucks Playhouse
Actors do a lot of things in order to play a role. They memorize lines, rehearse, think about their character’s motives, and discuss the play with the director, the writer when possible and their fellow actors.
In playing the part of Norman Thayer in Ernest Thompson’s 1979 play, On Golden Pond, Keir Dullea has found another way to connect to his character. In the play, Norman is an 80-year-old man, dealing with several issues, including his strained relationship with his daughter, Chelsea, and memory loss. And Mr. Dullea says part of his preparation for the part simply involved getting older.
”I’m not very far from the age of this character,” says the 79-year-old Mr. Dullea. “I’m not trying to play old, I just play me because the age is about right. I don’t have Alzheimer’s and I don’t have serious memory loss but both my wife and I have had the experience of going upstairs, reaching the top and saying ‘What did I come up here for.’ A couple of times a week, I go from one room to another and can’t remember what the hell I came in for. So that’s useful.”
Mr. Dullea and his wife, Mia Dillon, are starring as Norman and Ethel in a production of On Golden Pond to be staged at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, July 10 to Aug. 2. In the play, Norman and Ethel are settling down for the summer at their vacation home when they get a letter from their daughter, Chelsea (Christa Scott-Reed), saying she’ll be arriving to celebrate Norman’s birthday. She brings her boyfriend, Bill Ray (Don Noble) and his teenage son Billy (Cameron Clifford). The play explores the relationships between Norman and Ethel, Norman and his daughter, and Norman and Billy, who ends up spending the summer with the older couple.
On Golden Pond debuted on Broadway in 1979. It was adapted into a 1981 movie starring Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda, marking the only time that father and daughter appeared in a film together. It also won Mr. Fonda his only Oscar, and Katharine Hepburn her fourth. It was revived on Broadway in 2005 with James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggans.
”It’s a play that has a lot of surprising depth,” says Mr. Dullea, who is best-known for playing David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It has its funny side, if you’re going to describe it with one word, it’s a kind of comedy, but it has a lot of subtext in it that’s very interesting to explore.”
Mr. Dullea says he and Ms. Dillon have acted together about 10 times, and have played husband and wife a few times.
”We’ve been together 17 years, married 16,” he says. “A week after we got married, we were cast in a touring company of Deathtrap, in which I got to kill her off each night. More recently, two years ago at the Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (in New Orleans), we played Big Daddy and Big Mama in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’”
That production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was special for him because he played Brick in a Broadway revival of the play in 1974.
”I always wanted to play (Big Daddy), but never thought I’d ever get cast, so to get cast and then play it opposite my wife was a special treat,” he says. “We love working together.”
The couple in On Golden Pond is one that has stayed together and is indeed prepared to die together, not that that they don’t have issues.
”Even in the most perfect relationships, there are certain kinds of abrasive things that happen with any couple, and that makes it even more real,” Mr. Dullea says. “If it was all just hearts and flowers, it would be kind of dull. And part of the drama of this is, in spite of everything, they do love each other. You find that out by the end of the play. You see that as the play progresses but you also see there’s stuff between the characters.”
Performing at the Bucks County Playhouse marks something of a homecoming for Mr. Dullea, because as a child he attended the George School in Newtown.
”When I arrived at that school, I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” he says, adding that George School was where he started acting.
”I didn’t know it then, but probably the seed was planted that resulted in my becoming an actor,” he says. “George School had an unusually heightened drama program that you could take separate from the junior class play, or the senior class play. You could take drama as a half-unit subject, and we explored (John) Galsworthy and (George) Bernard Shaw and (William) Saroyan, and we did acting exercises.
”And I loved it, but it never occurred to me that someone would pay you to have fun. So it never occurred to me to become an actor. But looking back on it I realize that really is where the seed was planted that later on resulted on in my deciding to be an actor.”
On Golden Pond will be at the Bucks County Playhouse, 70 S. Main St., New Hope, Pennsylvania, July 10-Aug. 2. For more information, go to www.bcptheater.org or call 215-862-2121.
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