How can you lose? Even if a play has a tired, occasionally trite and sappy script, if you cast two masterful actors as its main characters, the show can succeed and entertain. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas' production of Ernest Thompson's "On Golden Pond" is a case in point.

Turned into a high profile, Oscar-generating film in 1981 for Henry Fonda and Kate Hepburn in the sunsets of their careers, this play appears mostly as dinner or community theater fare today. Yet, given the comedic strengths of the individual performances of CTD's Jerry Russell and Sylvia Leudtke as protagonist couple Norman and Ethel, the performance warrants more enthusiastic attention.

Russell and Luedtke's charming chemistry, the ease with which they play off of one another, conveys a depth of love and commitment that helps the labored script break through its superficial predictability. There is a sincere dignity in Russell's Norman. He never "plays for laughs," nor allows the curmudgeonly aspects of his character to mask over the reality of a frightened man aware of his own descent into dementia.

No, he doesn't express his love well, for either wife or grown daughter; But Russell gives wry glimpses of a kindly soul encased in a gruff shell, a very real human, not just a grumpy stereotype.