Cultural Park’s ‘On Golden Pond’ illustrates life’s hilarious, heartbreaking, human moments
Up next at Cape Coral’s Cultural Park Theatre is the 1979 classic On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson.
This is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer, who are returning to their summer home on Golden Pond in Maine for the forty-eighth year. He is a curmudgeonly nearly-80-year-old retired professor with heart palpitations and a failing memory, but he’s still as tart-tongued, observant and eager for life as ever. She is ten years his junior and delights in all the small things that have enriched and continue to enrich their long life together. But this year, their delightful summer routine–fishing, picking strawberries, enjoying old mementoes, listening to the loons call–is 
given a bitterly comedic edge by Norman’s unreliable memory and cantankerously morbid statements.
When their daughter, Chelsea, visits for Norman’s 80th birthday, bringing her boyfriend Bill and Bill’s teenage son, Billy Jr., the whole family must come to grips with Norman and Chelsea’s mutual bitterness, while Norman blossoms with his chance to mentor young Billy. The turbulent relationship between father and daughter, the generation gap between young and old, and the difficulties of a couple in the twilight years of a long marriage, all combine in a play that effortlessly illustrates the hilarious, heartbreaking, human moments of which life is made.
Greg Wojciechowski 
plays Norman with Gerrie Benzing portraying Ethel. Gwen Salata directs.
Go here for play dates, times and ticket information.
October 9, 2019.
About the Author
Tom Hall is both an amateur artist and aspiring novelist who writes art quest thrillers. He is in the final stages of completing his debut novel titled "Art Detective," a story that fictionalizes the discovery of the fabled billion-dollar Impressionist collection of Parisian art dealer Josse Bernheim-Jeune, thought by many to have perished during World War II when the collection's hiding place, Castle de Rastignac in southern France, was destroyed by the Wehrmacht in reprisal for attacks made by members of the Resistance operating in the area. A former tax attorney, Tom holds a bachelor's degree as well as both a juris doctorate and masters of laws in taxation from the University of Florida. Tom lives in Estero, Florida with his fiancee, Connie, and their four cats.