As temperatures warm up, and our temperaments improve, there’s something so soothing about spending a day on a sun-bathed, screened-in porch with two fabulous actresses.
And that’s what David Auburn’s Broadway play “Summer, 1976,” which opened Tuesday night on the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, generously provides — featuring the indomitable Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht.
Not that you just’re outside — even when Japhy Weideman’s sparkling lights warmly make you are feeling like you’re — or that the show is all smiles.
One hour and half-hour with no intermission. On the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West forty seventh Street.
Diana and Alice, two women who look back on their time on Ohio State University’s campus in Columbus, Ohio, where they grew close a long time earlier, are quietly unsatisfied.
The budding friends helped one another through trauma while concealing embarrassing secrets.
However the two-hander’s simply stated message, that “people aren’t only one thing,” is potently affirming, even in a play that’s apolitical and makes no attempts — as most Broadway shows do — at being epic or earth-shattering.
In a way, the story’s modesty allows emotion and intending to suddenly sneak up on you.
And, in the event you’ve seen Netflix’s “Ozark,” you realize that Laura Linney could be sneaky. She plays Diana, a single mother and professor with sophisticated taste in art, literature and architecture.
She claims to have “family money” and spends accordingly.
She’s also the kind of pinky-up person you initially detest, who speaks in pretentious “jejune”s and “gestalt”s, but whose weirdness you come to understand and even admire.
Diana meets one other mother named Alice, played by Hecht, who wears a flowy floral dress (costumes by Linda Cho) and acts a hippie regardless that she leads a repressed and traditional life, in a “babysitting co-op.”
In certainly one of those insular campus life moves, university parents have formed a bunch that trades tokens for child-watching duties.
At first the pair sneer at one another and their picks for his or her daughters’ names — Gretchen and Holly — but regularly turn out to be close confidants and peel back the layers.
Auburn’s play is told mostly in monologues to the audience — only rarely do the 2 speak directly to one another or embody one other character.
And only a couple of major events occur over 90 minutes.
What hits hardest, really, are small hardships — especially for Diana, as single moms were treated even worse through the 70s than they are actually.
One scene, by which a deep-feeling Hecht helps Linney’s character through a paralyzing migraine is a stunner.
The actresses are a perfect pairing of personality. Linney brings her ability to be each uncommonly kind and cutthroat to mysterious Diana, while Hecht’s expressive voice wavers from quirky to agonized.
The general effect of their performances and that of Auburn’s play, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is that of an on-stage indie movie, as wine, laughs and unlikely companions turn out to be the one ways to resist household hardships.
However the “Proof” playwright drags out his ending, at first with a clever bait-and-switch, after which with an “OK, you’ve made your point” long-windedness.
The moment it starts attempting to pack a punch, funnily enough, it packs less of 1.
Still, there are worse people to meander with than Linney and Hecht.
