Summer, 1976, being given its world premiere on Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club, is a memory play about two women recalling the origins of their friendship decades earlier. As beautifully played by stage veterans Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, Diana and Alice are both well-drawn, interesting characters whose significant differences in personality and viewpoints don’t prevent them from forming a close bond.
It’s too bad, then, that playwright David Auburn didn’t introduce them to each other.
This new drama from the author of Proof is the latest in a seemingly endless series of plays in which the story is told, not shown. Rather than dramatizing the events onstage, the characters, often sitting at opposite ends of a long table as if attending a board meeting, mainly tell their story via alternating monologues. It makes you wonder why theater has so often seemed to become a platform for bedtime stories for adults. Yes, as the recent Prima Facie proved, the narrative style can be effective. But that play benefited from a powerful storyline and a truly dynamic lead performance from Jodie Comer.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
In Summer, 1976 the two women meet, as Diana informs us at the beginning, through their children. Both are the parents of five-year-old daughters and participate in a “babysitting co-op” organized by Alice’s husband, a university professor. Alice is a stay-at-home mom — “She was essentially living like a 1950s housewife,” Diana sardonically comments — while single mother Diana, who became pregnant via a one-night stand, teaches at the university as well.
The play’s sharp writing, as well as Linda Cho’s character-defining costumes, effectively delineates the sharp contrasts between Diana, an aesthete with “family money” who casually throws around words like “jejune” and decries her friend’s penchant for “depressingly middlebrow” novels like James Clavell’s Shogun and Robin Cook’s Coma, and Alice, a financially struggling bohemian type who makes homemade frozen popsicles from juice to save money, self-confidently calls out Diana on her snobbishness, and doesn’t mind too much when her friend “bogarts” the marijuana joint she offered.
Auburn throws in some mildly dramatic plot elements, such as the two women’s attraction to the hunky graduate student spending the summer painting Alice’s house and late revelations about Diana’s actual teaching status and Alice’s marriage. But really, not very much of interest occurs over the course of the story, which plays out like a series of anecdotes related to friends over a few glasses of wine. Except without the liquid lubrication, it comes across as fairly dry.
More problematically, the play features a couple of narrative fake-outs, one definitely more convincing than the other, that frustratingly prove more interesting than the actual story. And several times Linney assumes the role of Alice’s unseen husband, although since she doesn’t alter her voice or mannerisms it becomes unnecessarily confusing.
The play nonetheless proves affecting, thanks to its sensitive insights about the vagaries of friendships and the way they can evolve, or not, with the passage of time and the impact of external forces. Under the uncluttered direction of Daniel Sullivan, the two actresses deliver sterling performances, displaying an authentic-seeming chemistry and making the closeness between their very different characters fully believable. You come away from Summer, 1976 feeling like you wish you’d been able to spend more time with Diana and Alice, and that they’d been able to spend more time with each other.
Summer, 1976 opened April 25, 2023, at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and runs through June 18. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
