It’s always good to see Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht onstage. I wish, though, that they had chosen an interesting play rather than David Auburn’s Summer, 1976. I can’t imagine what attracted them to these two boring, self-involved characters who talk, and talk, and talk about themselves but show little emotion, even when they are describing an unexpected pregnancy in college or the infidelity of a husband. If they can’t be more involved in their lives why should we?
Another mystery is why veteran Daniel Sullivan would want to direct this play, except that he directed Auburn’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Proof (which I also didn’t like), so maybe it was out of loyalty. Which might have been Linney's motivation, having worked with Sullivan in Time Stands Still in 2010.
Linney plays the haughty Diana, a failed artist now teaching at Ohio State University, and Hecht is Alice, a slightly flaky stay-at-home mom. They don’t like each other at first after having been brought together by their young daughters who are friends. They enter the stage at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from opposite sides and sit on chairs at either end of a table. The only other furniture is a bench at the back of the table. What is it with bare stages this season? Set designer John Lee Beatty puts Summer in the club with A Doll’s House and Camelot.
We learn about Diana and Alice initially as they sit and address the audience. In time they interact but never really breach the distance between them for long. I’m assuming the play is supposed to be a comedy. The audience certainly laughed enough. Here’s an example of what passes for humor throughout the 90-minute show. Diana tells us Alice thinks of herself as a hippie but she isn’t really, she just has a messy house. The audience roared. My theory about shows like this is that people who have watched sitcoms all their lives are programmed to laugh after every line because the studio audiences — and in years past, the laugh track — laugh after every line. People have been conditioned by stupid TV shows to laugh. I’d like to be able to push a pause button and turn to a couple of people and ask them why they found that funny. I bet they couldn’t answer.
But even if that comment had been funny, the hippie reference is odd for a play set in 1976. Hippies were so 1960s. I remember that summer well. I was between my sophomore and junior year in college. The country was full of joyful celebrations marking its Bicentennial. Why set a play in such a specific year and ignore that? The Tall Ships came to us in Baltimore but surely something must have been going on in Columbus, Ohio, where the play is set.
Diana and Alice seem oblivious to something else that was happening at the time that was even more important to me — the women’s movement. Did these two midwestern women not know what was going on? I don’t understand setting a play in such a specific year and then ignoring these two events that came to my mind as soon as I heard the play’s title.
Their clothes (costumes by Linda Cho) don’t reflect the period either, but I suppose we are to associate them with the older characters reflecting on their past. Diana wears black slacks and a black T-shirt and Alice is in a long, flowy, drab blue and red peasant dress. Both women would look right at home today in the East Village. The 70s was the decade of disco. Fashion reflected the “Saturday Night Fever” look.
Auburn was born in November of 1969 so he was probably ready to enter or had just finished first grade in the summer of 1976. He should have bounced this play off of his mother. She could have helped him be more year specific. Maybe she could have even helped him give his two female characters depth.
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