“Something must be wrong with my eyes,” said my friend Ashley when I met her in the lobby of the Jungle Theater after Friday night’s performance of On Golden Pond. “Tears were just shooting out from them horizontally.” I didn’t experience quite so dramatic a reaction to the show, but I definitely had a lingering lump in my throat after the curtain closed on the theater’s disciplined new production of Ernest Thompson’s 1979 play, well-known as the basis for Mark Rydell’s 1981 film.

Co-stars Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn won Oscars for their work in that movie; those lead roles in the Jungle production are filled by Bain Boehlke and Wendy Lehr, Minnesota theater legends who have both received Lifetime Achievement Ivey Awards and who have been close collaborators in numerous productions spanning decades. Their partnership brings a special gravity to this production, and they’re entirely credible as a couple who have spent nearly 50 years together.

The play is set on the fictional Golden Pond—inspired by the real-life Great Pond, a lake in Maine. As director and set designer, Boehlke brings his trademark detail and depth to the set, which will feel very familiar to Minnesotans who vacation in our own northwoods lake country—right down to the loons. The story follows long-married couple Norman (Boehlke) and Ethel (Lehr) over the course of a summer, very possibly their last, at the lakeside cabin they’ve owned since their daughter Chelsea (Jennifer Blagen) was young.

That daughter shows up for a rare visit, accompanied by her new boyfriend Bill (Michael Booth) and his young son Billy (Peter Lindell). She finally confronts her father over their long-strained relationship, and he’s challenged to discover whether, as he turns 80, he’s capable of building a new rapport with his only child.

It’s a gentle story, without dramatic revelations or violent confrontations. Though the premise could be that of a play by O’Neill or Albee, no one on Golden Pond touches a drop of booze and everyone comports themselves in a largely civil manner. The genius of the play is that the key conflicts are largely within Norman’s head—and line by line, we see the aging paterfamilias oscillate between his lifelong cynical schtick and a real fear of his life’s gathering dusk.

Boehlke is remarkable, creating a character in whom many viewers will recognize the older men in their family just as surely as they recognize the cabin’s janky screen door. Thompson gives Norman dozens of sharp lines, and Boehlke bites into each one, keeping the audience amused and fascinated. Norman isn’t a monster, but he’s sometimes hurtfully insensitive, and his wife and daughter have had their own relationship strained due to a disagreement over how much it’s reasonable to ask Norman to change.

Lehr is appropriately sturdy as Ethel, though Thompson gives her a lot less to work with: her big monologue comes at a weirdly inappropriate moment, and it’s a testament to the quality of this production that a glaring flaw in Thompson’s script feels like nothing more than a speed bump as the the show proceeds to its gratifyingly measured, quietly moving conclusion.

Adding a layer of poignance to this production is the fact that it concludes the last full season of Boehlke’s tenure as artistic director of the Jungle, a company he founded 25 years ago in a smaller space near the superb theater the company now occupies at Lake and Lyndale. In a program note, Boehlke remembers “those days before the Greenway, before the condo high rises, before Fuji Ya, before Herkimer’s, before Muddy Waters, before the trees with fairy lights, when It’s Greek to Me was really the only neighborhood restaurant that offered before-theater dining, when the building which the theater now calls home was a bar with more 911 calls than any other location in the Twin Cities!”

It’s truly a different world now at Lyn-Lake—my girlfriend and I started the night with a majestic harvest platter at Muddy Waters, then had a nightcap at the brand-new and gleefully bustling LynLake Brewery. The Jungle has been an anchor of the neighborhood’s development, just as Boehlke and Lehr have been anchors of the local theater scene. Though Boehlke isn’t retiring from acting and directing, there’s a valedictory feel to his Golden Pond. There are so many reasons to experience this strong—one might even say historic—production, and no good reasons not to.

– Jay Gabler