Broadway Play Review—David Auburn’s “Summer, 1976” with Laura Linney

Summer, 1976

Written by David Auburn; directed by Daniel Sullivan

Performances through June 18, 2023

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

Jessica Hecht and Laura Linney in David Auburn's Summer, 1976 (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

David Auburn’s best play, the Tony-winning Proof, showed he can handle intimate subject matter with finesse and sensitivity; his new two-hander, Summer, 1976, about a short friendship that lingers long after, is further proof, so to speak, of his ability. 

Diana and Alice, who live in Columbus, Ohio, meet through their five-year-old daughters: single mom Diana is the mother of Gretchen, and married Alice is Holly’s mother. As the daughters start to play together, the women tentatively begin to hang out: they talk, drink iced tea, smoke a joint and, eventually, become quite close, through the ups and downs of their other relationships—until the summer of our nation’s bicentennial ends.

Auburn has cogently written an “opposites attract” situation, with Diana a smug college art teacher and artist and Alice a stay-at-home wife and mother. Diana mocks Alice’s choice of reading material (James Clavell’s Shogun, of all things, which Diana calls a “depressingly middlebrow novel”), while Alice is put off by Diana’s airs: “I’d already had to look at her art since four or five of her pieces were scattered around on the porch—she said she worked out there sometimes—and get a mini-lecture about each one, except strike the ‘mini’ part,” she sardonically relates about her first visit to Diana's home.

The play primarily comprises two monologues that occasionally intrude upon each other; for much of the time, the actresses speak to the audience and rarely acknowledge or reply to the other. Only in the final scene, set nearly three decades later, do they truly interact. Although there are easy motherhood jokes (Diana sneers, “I hate the name Holly,” referring to Alice’s daughter, but Diana named hers Gretchen) and subplots about emotionally unavailable men (Diana finds Alice’s handyman attractive but it turns out—surprise—that he and Alice’s husband are carrying on a secret affair) that are straight out of Playwriting 101, Summer, 1976 eloquently comes alive onstage. 

That adroit director Daniel Sullivan—already attuned to the rhythms of Auburn’s language (he also won a Tony for directing Proof)—subtly moves the actresses around John Lee Beatty’s simple but evocative set of a couple of chairs and a table, with an assist from Japhy Weideman’s expressive lighting that recalls Paul Klee, whose art is mentioned in the dialogue and is part of the reason the women run into each other in 2003, in the poignant final scene. 

As Diana, Laura Linney gives another of her astute and captivating portrayals, being intense or ironical, exasperating or exasperated in turn. Linney’s always formidable presence seems to have rubbed off on the usually mannered Jessica Hecht, whose Alice is only occasionally afflicted with the affectations and tricks Hecht usually conjures. She still has her share of irritating moments, but for the most part Hecht nearly keeps up with Linney. Though how Hecht got a Tony nomination and Linney did not is mystifying: did the nominators actually see Summer, 1976?