‘Summer, 1976’ Review: Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht Make—and Break—a Friendship

That famous event of Summer, 1976—America’s bicentennial—is a rumbling but not significant backdrop to David Auburn’s gently affecting play of the same name about the undulating terrain of a friendship. We hear fireworks in the distance, and celebratory events are attended by its lead and only characters, Diana and Alice, played with an engaging immediacy and intimacy by Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht.

Late in the play, in a sequence where this Manhattan Theatre Club production (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to June 10) takes what turns out to be deceptive flight, the vast swathe of America itself becomes the canvas of the play, far from the setting of Columbus, Ohio where the women live. A whole country of possibilities opens up, then closes down—rather like the central, tantalizing relationship between the women.

First, as they sit at a table center stage, we sense opposites attracting and repelling. The thing that brings together these two very different women are their kids. Dressed in black with primly straight blonde hair, Linney plays the efficient and meticulous Diana, initially sniffily judgmental about the messy home, messy child (Holly, always with a runny nose), and hippyish bearing of Hecht’s Alice, dressed in her flowing print dress.

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