Bristol Riverside Theatre presents Ernest Thompson’s ‘On Golden Pond’

Playwright Ernest Thompson uses this frame to consider the big-ticket existential issues that stage scribes can’t resist pondering. Make no mistake: the plot contains everything including the kitchen sink. We can almost see it all in Charles Morgan’s knotty-pine set, which looks like it was ordered from an L.L. Bean catalog.

Love and death

Norman (Keith Baker, also BRT’s artistic director) and his wife Ethel (Jeanne Lehman, warm and sympathetic) confront marriage and mortality. (“You’re old and I’m ancient,” he bellows after she coyly suggests they’re still in middle age.) The strained relationship between the couple and their adult daughter Chelsea (Eleanor Handley), who’s about to become a stepmom herself, introduces a host of family concerns. The looming possibility of Norman’s death adds a sense of melodramatic urgency — a tacit entreaty to resolve domestic problems while you still can.

Tidy and dusty

Tidy though the play may be — it moves briskly under Susan D. Atkinson’s direction — it has undoubtedly taken on a layer of dust since its premiere in 1979. The script is also chock-a-block with off-color jokes about racial, religious, and sexual minorities that must have been offensive 40 years ago and sound even more terminally tone-deaf now. Norman unironically uses outdated terms for African Americans and people of Asian descent that I won’t repeat in print, and he refers to a Jewish lawyer as “Mr. Shylock.”

Perhaps Thompson wants us to recognize Norman as an avatar of a receding generation — an irascible old coot who shirks political correctness. Yet that worldview, like so much else on display here, has been handled more forthrightly in subsequent plays, ones that don’t shy away from the attendant mess involved.

Likewise, Norman’s fatalism seems cutesy rather than moribund, a dose of gallows humor masquerading as a dark night of the soul. The fact that Baker looks a touch too hale and hearty for the role and moves with a noticeable spring in his step accentuates the shallow treatment of illness and death.

Kids these days

Thompson telegraphs resolutions you can see coming from a country mile. Tense, guarded Chelsea casts herself as prodigal daughter with a litany of complaints for both parents, which melt away when she marries her sensible boyfriend Bill (Danny Vaccaro, a touch too slick for the part). Whether Bill and Chelsea should sleep in the same room before marriage forms a major plot point in the first act, which only reinforces the play’s stuffiness.

The introduction of stepson Billy (Henry Parker, charming in his professional stage debut) allows Norman’s gruffness to melt away in a surfeit of grandfatherly pride. Thompson embraces the familiar, facile idea that family-building heals all wounds. Norman teaches the boy French and fishing, and in turn learns what it means when the kids “suck face.” The growing intergenerational bond between the crusty codger and streetwise teenager is awash in sentimentalist movie-of-the-week cliché — though, judging from the knowing sighs heard among the opening-night audience, it’s a trope that resonates.

Faith and sweetness

Still, On Golden Pond possesses a sweetness that shines through the dated script, and the talented cast give the material full faith. Handley, a dependable veteran of several BRT productions, brings a dimensionality to Chelsea that transcends Thompson’s somewhat slight characterization. Sporting a New England accent you could cut with a knife, Michael Satow provides comic relief as the hapless mailman harboring a decades-long crush on her.

Conor Mulligan’s chiaroscurist lighting nicely conveys the season’s passage, as gilded summer turns to autumn and the Thayers take stock of an impending winter. These considerations, presumably, happen after the curtain falls. They would almost certainly be too heavy for Thompson’s neat sensibilities to contemplate.