‘Summer, 1976’ Broadway Review: Laura Linney & Jessica Hecht Summon A Haunting Friendship
Broadway can be a loud place, with belters belting and orchestras swelling and actors playing to rafters in the theater across the street, so it’s both comforting and mesmerizing to see a play as quietly poignant as David Auburn’s Summer, 1976.
Starring Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht – both outstanding – Summer, 1976, a Manhattan Theatre Club production opening tonight at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, recounts a long-ago friendship that, on the surface, doesn’t seem particularly unusual or outwardly impactful.
Two women, both connected to Ohio State University, are brought together through their young daughters: the mothers are part of a babysitting co-op, and though the two women take an instant disliking to one another, circumstance and proximity begin to wear away their defenses. Alice, played by Hecht, is vaguely hippie-ish, married to a professor and often carrying a joint or two, while the other, Linney’s Diana, is a single mom, teaches art and comes off as something of a pretentious snob.
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Needless to say, appearances can be deceiving, as the characters and the audience gradually discover. That’s not to suggest that Summer, 1976 is loaded with bombshell revelations. It’s not. The characters reveal themselves slowly and merely through recounting their memories of that long-ago Bicentennial summer.
In fact, the friendship barely made it to autumn, devolving into a strained acquaintance that soon faded altogether. So what happened that summer that will haunt these characters for decades?
The short answer, maybe even the long answer, is that friendship happened. Summer, 1976, thoughtfully directed by Daniel Sullivan (reuniting with his Proof playwright Auburn and his The Little Foxes star Linney), captures an experience that’s as universal as it is inexplicable: a friendship that shouldn’t work but does, and that should endure but doesn’t.
Structured as a memory play, Summer, 1976 has the two actors on a mostly bare stage, with hints of the season suggested by John Lee Beatty’s minimalist backyard set design, Linda Cho’s casual, era-perfect costumes, and a lighting design (Japhy Weideman), sound design (Jill BC Du Boff) and projections (Hana S. Kim) that conjure lightning bugs and fireworks. It’s up to Linney and Hecht to summon the rest – the pleasures and hurts and unexpected ways even short-lived companionships can linger like a breezy dusk.
Title: Summer, 1976
Venue: Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Director: Daniel Sullivan
Playwright: David Auburn
Cast: Laura Linney, Jessica Hecht
Running time: 1 hr 30 min (no intermission)
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