REVIEW : ‘Golden Pond’ May Be Troupe’s Swan Song

The West Covina Playhouse is staging a bittersweet play, “On Golden Pond,” on a melancholy note: The theater is destined to be razed for a shopping mall parking lot after the run of this production, throwing the 75-member Playhouse into an uncertain future after an eight-year history as West Covina’s only community theater.

Playhouse Director Linda Jones informed patrons before the curtain at last weekend’s opening that “On Golden Pond” is the troupe’s swan song unless it can find a new home, which it has failed to do.

The 150-seat theater (a former restaurant) has been leased by the Playhouse from the city for two years. The city’s Redevelopment Agency, in turn, has negotiated a deal with developers of the adjacent mall to turn the property into expanded parking space.

Meanwhile, theatergoers can enjoy a mellow sail around the lake in Maine that playwright Ernest Thompson poetically called Golden Pond. You can hear the sound of loons drifting through the rustic summer cabin of the curmudgeonly protagonist (played by the bearlike Howard Peterson) and his endearing wife (chirpy Jane Ryan Ho).

These are characters in the waning light of their lives--he’s 80 and she’s near 70, and the emotional current in the play is the specter of lives winding down, a sweet couple’s last summer together in a sylvan paradise enlivened by the arrival of their daughter (Holly J. Witham), her defensive fiance (Mike Chamberlain) and his young, smart-aleck son (David Crum).

The production’s anchor is the bulky and gruff but vulnerable Peterson, whose wobbling gait subtly suggests a man with failing health. Peterson is archly funny, with a bigger bag of one-liners than this reviewer recalls from previous productions. At times he suggests Jonathan Winters. But Jones allows him so much comedic rope that the production’s deeper resonances are muffled.

In Thompson’s script (made familiar by the popular movie with Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn), the wife’s presence is much more strongly felt than it is in this production, where the woman’s oaken strength is basically reduced to a Good Housekeeping role.

The daughter and her dentist lover are also off-kilter because Witham and Chamberlain are too uncomfortable and tense as performers to earn the requisite empathy as characters who really are nervous.

Master Crum’s 13-year-old boy, though, who mellows and becomes Peterson’s fishing buddy, is nicely drawn. The other supporting character, a chatty mailman (Michael Di Rosa) cackles so stridently and chews cookies so loudly (he even mashes his chops during the curtain call) that you want to scream. Community theater doesn’t benefit by casting characters from “The Gong Show.”

In a manner of speaking, the star of the production is producer/designer Frank Jones’ interior set, a warm New England cabin with a stone fireplace and a verdant, green forest visible through the windows. The mood is accompanied by ripe modulated lighting and those loons singing in the woods (from lighting and sound technician Pat Murray).

“On Golden Pond,” West Covina Playhouse, 911 West Covina Parkway, West Covina, Friday-Saturdays, 8 p.m., matinees, this Sunday and Feb. 2, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 8; $6-$8. (818-814-9694). Running time: 2 hrs., 40 min.