EDGE Philadelphia

Would you believe that I loved every single minute of Act II’s On Golden Pond?

I know what you’re thinking. Schmaltz-fest of a movie about an old couple’s last summer at their waterfront Maine home. Kathryn Hepburn, Jane and Henry Fonda, multiple Academy Awards. Seen it. Loved it. Just like the rest of America when the film premiered in 1981.

Sorry. If you haven’t seen Ernest Thompson’s play on stage, especially in the outstanding production Act II offers, you need to re-visit this classic piece of Americana.

The play still shows Norman (Tom McCarthy) and Ethel Thayer (Carla Belver), an aging couple retreating, for the 48th straight year, to their summer home on Maine’s Golden Pond. Dementia has started to fracture Norman’s memory, and world-weariness weakens his resolve as he struggles to find meaning and purpose at the end of life. Ethel’s sprightliness still steadies him, and to each of her concerns--or to any line from anyone during the entire play--he shoots back a wisecrack designed to strip the moment’s sincerity.

Absolutely nothing happens. The mailman (an excellent Tom Byrn) delivers letters by boat, their daughter Chelsea (Megan Bellwoar) arrives for Norman’s 80th birthday, bringing along her new boyfriend Bill (Carl Granieri) and his 13-year-old son Billy (Peter Balcke). Chelsea and Bill traipse off to Europe and leave Billy behind; Norman takes the kid fishing every morning, and they read books every night. In her father’s declining health, Chelsea finds a reason to forgive, and in this surrogate grandson, Norman rediscovers purpose, and resumes his will to live.

So yes, nothing happens. But Thompson’s play doesn’t portray a mere naturalistic slice-of-life family-room drama in the pejorative sense of that term. Instead, On Golden Pond offers a crystallization of life’s essence and meaning over a series of scenes that hearkens back across three generations to show families united by simple traditions and un-fractured by a modern, unending quest for validation.

While the expertly delivered, cleverly constructed humor occasionally touches a morbid tone, this play never once dwells on death or regrets except to dismiss them with a joke. Thompson otherwise fills the story’s arc with a life-embracing earnestness that’s not innocent, as the un-PC humor attests, but that nonetheless doesn’t drift into the muck of despair.

I called it Americana, but I can’t believe that an American wrote this play. Problems that Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller would have used to develop a whole play are here dismissed with a simple "get over it" (one spoken from the mother to the daughter, who listens).

And if anything, On Golden Pond stands as an answer, almost a retaliation, against the whining psychobabble that’s infected American playwrights for half a century. But it’s not insensitive or cruel; it reflects a family who, unlike writers that dwell on their problems, actually gets the existentialist imperative and realizes that we cannot exhaust the energies of the present on exhuming the mistakes of the past.

But the script couldn’t achieve half of this rich meaning without the phenomenal acting of McCarthy and Belver, who anchor the play not as a pair of actors, but as a couple who has built a life for over 50 years. You could put a picture of the two of them on a Christmas ornament, let it hang from your tree, and no one would doubt they weren’t part of your-or any-family.

Mark Valenzuela’s sound of loons and Dick Durossette’s rustic, inviting set design lets the Maine wilderness waft in through the screens. And while the endearing performances of the ensemble prove that family isn’t always about blood, the interludes in Bud Martin’s superb direction create a sense of community, habit, and tradition that forms a permanence into which they all settle. The "events" of this play have happened every summer and will continue to happen; we only witness the threads that string the scenes in sequence and weave together the little rituals of an entire lifetime.

How could I not love it? This is not a play, but a celebration, and this production’s sense of life gave me one of the most charming evenings of theatre I can remember.

On Golden Pond plays through Dec. 13 at Ambler’s Act II Playhouse, located at 56 E. Butler Avenue.

Tickets cost $25 for weekday performances (Tue.-Thur.) and $30 for weekend (Fri.-Sun.), and can be obtained online at www.act2.org