Review: A Wistful SUMMER, 1976 at Central Square Theater

If we’re fortunate, we make friends at every stage of life – from the people we grow up with to high-school and college classmates, co-workers and onetime partners, and sometimes our neighbors, as is depicted in playwright David Auburn’s naturalistic 2022 drama “Summer, 1976” – at Central Square Theater through November 30 – in which two women with little in common bond as friends during their young daughters’ playdates in the summer months of the bicentennial year.

A memory play of sorts, the Ohio-set story is told – with occasional asides to the audience – through the unfolding friendship of a single college professor, Diana (Lee Mikesa Gardner), and a married faculty wife, Alice (Laura Latreille), who are living in the suburbs and navigating the attendant loneliness that can go with that life. Auburn, a Pulitzer Prize winner for 2000’s “Proof,” which is being revived on Broadway this coming spring, has here written a sensitive script that focuses not only on the time they spend building their nascent relationship but also on their respective insights into each other.

Well into the second wave of feminism, the two women are brought together by the proximity of their homes and by their daughters’ friendship. At the outset, the highly educated artist Diana looks down on Alice, whom she sees as little more than a housewife. While they overcome that initial impasse, it soon becomes clear that for each, this is a summer of their own discontent, leaving them both feeling unmoored.

The play premiered in April 2023 at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, with Laura Linney as Diana and Jessica Hecht as Alice. In Cambridge, under the knowing direction of Paula Plum, the single-act, 90-minute drama features the bravura pairing of the estimable Gardner, CST’s Artistic Director, and the always on-her-game Latreille. Their restrained Diana and flower-child Alice come together when they’re most needed in each other’s lives, and when the women’s movement and the battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment is being undermined by conservative activists like Phyllis Schlafly.

In their own ways, both these women are feminists in the mid-1970s grappling with how to hold on to their individual identities so that they’re not subsumed by society or by family. They don’t always see eye-to-eye, though, verbally jousting on subjects from art to literature. When the snobbish Diana passes judgment on Alice’s choice of reading material, the latter is quick to put her in her place and let her know that she will make her own summer reading list. Discussions of influential artist Paul Klee – a favorite of Diana’s, unknown to Alice – create even deeper fissures in their occasionally tentative interactions. 

And while those energized exchanges may bring the characters to life more engagingly, the monologue approach that’s also used is very effective in allowing the audience to step inside the minds of these complicated, but still familiar, characters.

When the summer fades and their friendship with it, it is hard not to recall wistfully one’s own similar experiences when we just didn’t try hard before we let someone go. This sensitively wrought two-hander asks audiences to consider whether we genuinely miss the person, or just the memories of the time we spent with them. It’s something many of us have pondered about in our own lives.

Fleshing out time and place are a top-notch design team including scenic designer Kristin Loeffler, whose simple and uncluttered set is well served by Justin LaHue’s imaginative projection designs, Deb Sullivan’s moody lighting, and Audrey Dube’s evocative sound design. Costume Designer Sydney Hovasse contributes to the production’s overall look, too, with outfits that speak to how these characters see themselves.

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