ON GOLDEN POND

by Thompson, Ernest

A touching, funny and warmly perceptive study of a spirited and lovable elderly couple facing their twilight years. Ethel and Norman Thayer return to their summer home on Golden Pond for the 44th year. He is a retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing memory, but still as sharp-tongued, observant and eager for life as ever. Ethel, ten years younger and the perfect foil for Norman, delights in all the small things which have enriched and continue to enrich their life together. They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiance, who then go off to Europe, leaving his teenage son behind for the summer. The boy quickly beomes the grandchild the elderly couple have longed for and as Norman revels in taking his ward fishing and thrusting good books at him, he also learns some lessons about modern teenage awareness in return. In the end, as the summer wanes, so does their brief idyll and in the final deeply moving moments of the play, Norman and Ethel are brought even closer together by the incidence of a mild heart attack. A work of rare simplicity and beauty.