Jungle's 'Golden Pond' is all about leaving

What's the most frightening thing about getting old? No longer being able to remember your way through the woods? Knowing that at any moment you might be separated from your companion of 48 years? Wondering whether a loon's call is the last you'll ever hear?

Take your pick. For Norman Thayer, played by Bain Boehlke in the Jungle Theater's current production of "On Golden Pond," the fear comes down as the curtain goes up. In the play's first moments, he picks out a familiar tune on a toy piano, but the final note eludes him. He tries again, and in the long pause as he works to recall the end of a musical phrase he's known all his life, we see the hint of everything we need to know.

Norman and his wife, Ethel (Wendy Lehr), are spending the summer at their beloved cabin in Maine, although the word "cabin" doesn't do justice. Golden Pond is both a place and a way of life bound up in family history and local culture, where the mail arrives by boat and the mailman once dated the family's daughter, where knickknacks on the mantelpiece are relics infused with stories of the distant past.

Like life itself, Golden Pond is a place you'd hate to leave. But leaving (to borrow from William Nicholson's "Shadowlands") is part of the deal.

Norman is a retired English professor in his late 70s, and Ethel is a decade younger. They differ in the ways they deal with death; Ethel prefers not to think about it, while Norman seems to think of little else. "Do you realize this is our 48th summer on Golden Pond?" she asks. "Probably our last," he grouses.

There is a little bit of plot, involving Ethel and Norman's daughter, her boyfriend and the boyfriend's son. There is a lot of character development, most of it involving Norman, who is thoroughly irascible and suffers from advancing dementia, a casually racist world view and a tendency to skewer others as a hedge against his own weakness.

Billy, the boyfriend's son, comes to stay part of the season at Golden Pond, and soon he and Norman develop a friendship that changes both of them: Billy goes from a bored and disengaged teenager to a fishing and reading enthusiast. Norman goes from a grouch to ... well, a grouch, but with moments of human warmth.

Boehlke is retiring next year after 25 years as the founding artistic director of the Jungle. His pending departure gives the show a bittersweet context. But, like Norman toward the end of the second act, he's positive about the future.

"I'm still healthy and still running around, so I look forward to the next incarnation of my career," he told MPR News' Marianne Combs last summer.

Watching him work on this stage that he built, moving about a beautiful set that he designed, portraying a character that he inhabits in a show that he also directed, it's hard to think of his leaving. Even if leaving is part of the deal.

"On Golden Pond" runs at the Jungle through Dec. 21.