In the play “On Golden Pond,” three generations of a family reconnect at a summer home in Maine, exposing complicated relationships and vulnerabilities. Easthampton Theater Company’s upcoming production of the show runs the weekends of March 15-16 and March 21-23 at Williston Theater.

The play, which was later adapted into a movie with Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda, is about Norman and Ethel Thayer, an elderly couple celebrating their 48th summer in their summer home in Maine. Norman, a cantankerous retired academic, deals with memory issues; he and Ethel, but especially him, are likewise dealing with the struggles of aging and long-term relationships. Later, when their daughter Chelsea (who has a particularly difficult relationship with Norman) shows up with her new boyfriend Bill and his son Billy, Norman and Billy develop a loving grandfather-grandson relationship, which makes Chelsea resentful.

Michael O. Budnick, president of Easthampton Theater Company, said that one of the main reasons the company selected the show is because it’s relevant to their audience: In Easthampton, 35% of the residents are over 60.

“There’s a lot of cross-generational things that are going on within the community that people can really relate to and really understand,” Budnick said. “I think that this show brings it home, and it does it in a way that is poignant and humorous and just heartwarming.”

That said, when you’re doing a show about complex interpersonal relationships, it helps when your director is a psychotherapist.

Director Jason Rose-Langston, who has a psychotherapy practice in Easthampton, said: “My understanding of psychology really allows the actors to find the emotional beats in their performance, whether it be line by line or the emotional arc that a character takes over a scene or the whole play.”

The character Norman is arguably an anti-hero with plenty of psychological depth. Even as he struggles with memory issues – in the show’s very first scene, he doesn’t recognize family members in a photograph – he maintains a sense of haughtiness and superiority. This, said Rose-Langston, comes from “a deep, deep fear within him” about the loss of his faculties and about his own mortality.

“In those moments when his frailty shows through, he counters with wit. He counters with the assertion of his prowess as an academic, or something like that – very, very typical for people who are in that phase of life,” he said. “He’s also known as being a very powerful character all the way through his lifetime – he’s the English professor you did not want to get because he would rip your paper apart, and yet, there’s a playfulness to him.”

Budnick agreed that Norman is “certainly not the most likable guy, especially in the beginning. He says some pretty offensive things, and he can be quite the curmudgeon. But as the play goes on, you see that, as he should be and as everybody is, he’s multi-dimensional. There are some things that you can really love about the guy, and you know that he’s got pain. You know he’s hurting. He’s gone through his own stuff.”

Rose-Langston loves directorial choices that come from collaborations with the actors. There’s a moment in the show in which the script gives an actor one of two choices: Slap another character or slam a table. Though Rose-Langston didn’t want to say which one happens in this production; he let the actors choose based on what they felt their characters would do rather than choosing an option himself.

Another result of collaboration: Late in the show, there are a few lines of dialogue between Norman and Ethel in a particular moment. Rose-Langston said that he and the actors decided, “OK, this is the first thing they ever said to each other, this is how they met, and they’ve been repeating these three little lines to each other over and over and over again through time.”

“It’s this wonderful emotional note between the two of them,” he said. “Things like that that you can’t really plan on, but I believe you have to be open to in order to make the magic. That’s the magical stuff of theater that you can’t get on a screen, that you can’t get if you’re not working collaboratively, if you can’t bring all of the ideas.”

Budnick said that the cast has bonded very well and developed “a chemistry across the generations” over the course of the rehearsal process. The Thayer family has a much harder time of it – even after decades, in some cases, some characters still hold onto tensions.

“[Loving] each other through the transitions of life – not easy, not easy at all,” Rose-Langston said. “It’s beautifully depicted in the show, and all of the ugliness of it, where love fails us, where we think we’re loving people but we’re really not, and where it’s misunderstood, whether it’s lost in translation or whether it’s assumed. But the common thread of learning to love each other through time, that’s what really comes through in the show.”

Tickets to “On Golden Pond” are $21 for students, seniors and members of the military and $23 for adults via easthamptontheater.com.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.