He’s a pain in a rut.
An inveterate curmudgeon, retired English professor Norman Thayer (Jim Cada) is all gloom-and-doom as he spends his last summer at the family’s lake cabin in Maine. He and his wife, Ethel (genial Susanne Egli), have been together for 48 years, and she knows that it’s a fear of death that makes him undercut nearly everything she says as he approaches his 80th birthday.
After humoring him for a bit, Ethel tells him: “You really are the sweetest man in the world. But I’m the only one who knows it.”
“On Golden Pond,” the Ernest Thompson play best known for its 1981 film version headlined by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, is up in a not-to-be-missed production at Minnetonka Theatre, the intimate, well equipped community playhouse attached to Minnetonka High School.
Languid like a beach vacation, Trent Boyum’s production is suffused with the sounds of loons and an air of inevitability. Like all idylls, these times are fleeting. But the staging is bittersweetly entertaining, inviting us into the memories of a couple and family as they wrap up a season of life.
A long-married acting couple who have coached theater at Minnetonka High School for 20 years, Cada and Egli have easy mastery of their copious lines. But it’s their chemistry that makes this “Pond” twinkle. Their dialogue — I’m loath to call them arguments, since Ethel never really takes the bait — rings with truth and knowing.
Ethel has a deep empathy for her husband and sees the cowering man in need of an embrace under the gruff exterior. In fact, there’s a moment in the show, after Norman has tried to gather some strawberries, that’s quite touching.
And even though Cada’s Norman is macabre, the actor demonstrates an emotional economy and restraint that leavens the gloom of his view.
