THEATER REVIEW : A Smooth Sail on Newport Center’s ‘Golden Pond’

NEWPORT BEACH — The problem with any film version of a play is that it preserves forever one and only one approach to the material. The play, on the other hand, gets reinvented with each revival--or, as an actor once told me, “It isn’t that you see ‘Hamlet’ 50 times. It’s that you see 50 different ‘Hamlets.’ ”

So, if you see the Newport Theatre Arts Center’s revival of “On Golden Pond,” don’t even think about the movie with Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda. The Hollywood take on Ernest Thompson’s play may have turned it into sentimental mush, but the play on its own is a different animal.

Here, director Jack Millis displays such a firm grip on the play’s ebbs and flows that his cast alternates easily between comedy and drama without giving off a sense of manipulating us. Everything seems to stem naturally from the unpredictable, cantankerous center of the play’s universe, Norman Thayer Jr., as played by Stuart Eriksen.

Thompson means to please the crowd with a family tale that travels from rifts to reconciliations, and the road often is too gentle a grade for the drama’s own good. But Norman is a real stage character, and Eriksen has delicious fun with him.

Another actor might turn Norman into a kind of aged Yankee clown (like the coot in the old Pepperidge Farm commercials.) Henry Fonda played Norman as Henry Fonda. Eriksen plays him, it feels, very close to the way Thompson wrote him: quietly afraid that his virile intelligence is dissolving, deeply conflicted over his perversely estranged relationship with his daughter, Chelsea (played by Denise Cochran), and coolly aware of his gift as a control freak.

It isn’t just Eriksen’s razor-sharp timing on Norman’s many disarming one-liners; it’s his whole approach. He makes us wonder what he is silently reading in the paper he cradles, and when he stumbles mentally, we are concerned. Call it Theater of Empathy.

In a way, “On Golden Pond” is more of a character study than a play, because Thompson only sketches in the other characters, who essentially orbit around Norman. They would not exist without Norman, and they’re not remotely as interesting or as funny. Eriksen’s strong performance tends to compound this problem, but at least the gap isn’t made wider by the cast supporting him, which is good and thoughtful.

Norman’s wife, Ethel, is played by Joyce Eriksen--Stuart’s wife--and there is a deeply ingrained familiarity between the two, like a special chemical bond, far stronger than any cheap Hallmark sentiments.

The one who suffers most from the Norman-centric playmaking is Cochran, who doesn’t quite sell us on Chelsea’s bitterness. She seems too well-adjusted, with too nice a new husband (James Covert, who makes the most of his scene with Norman). When she switches gears into whining mode, Cochran doesn’t explore the pain underneath.

Aaron Charney’s Charlie tends to milk the pathetic side of this “middle-aged male spinster” but still comes up with an affecting portrayal of a man stuck in place. Alistair Tober plays Chelsea’s stepson Billy like he was made for it and convincingly brings Norman out of his shell--and out on the pond for some serious fishing. We get the point that Norman wanted a son and not a daughter all along without the actors underlining it.

Linda Geren Smith’s woodsy, comfy vacation cabin is aided greatly by Jeanne Nininger’s wide array of domestic props. But Bob Ashby’s good lighting becomes precious during scene ends. Precious we don’t need, and, mostly, precious we don’t get.

* “On Golden Pond,” Newport Theatre Arts Center, 2501 Cliff Drive, Newport Beach. Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 29. $13. (714) 631-0288. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Stuart Eriksen: Norman Thayer Jr.

Joyce Eriksen: Ethel Thayer

Denise Cochran: Chelsea

Aaron Charney: Charlie

Alistair Tober: Billy

James Covert: Bill

A Newport Theatre Arts Center production of a play by Ernest Thompson, directed by Jack Millis. Set: Linda Geren Smith. Lights: Bob Ashby. Costumes: Tom Phillips.