Patti LuPone recently complained that today’s Broadway is too much like a theme park. I’m not convinced the great diva has seen many of the shows this season yet — they’re just as likely to feature actors sitting in chairs with less adrenaline-pumping excitement than a kiddie ride.
Not every show has to keep hitting the gas if its quiet revelations about the mysteries of life are powerful enough. And when you have actors of the quality and appeal of Laura Linney (“Ozark,” of late) and Jessica Hecht (“Breaking Bad”), the two stars of David Auburn’s subtle “Summer, 1976,” an intimate chance to visit with them can be reason enough to buy a ticket.
“Summer, 1976? begins among junior Ohio State faculty in the titular summer in leafy if prosaic Columbus, Ohio. We meet Diana (Linney), an artist who is teaching with some mix of reluctance and pedagogical ambition, and Alice (Hecht), the wife of an economics professor. Both women have young daughters at home and they bond over babysitting collectives, past disappointments and their own uncertainties about the trajectories of life.
The pair are quite different, with Diana much steelier and more abrasive than the goofier and gentler Alice. But Auburn clearly wants to probe how this seemingly platonic friendship, perched on the edge of eros, so to speak, actually is very similar to an intense love affair. The relationship is hardly lacking in mutual criticism and annoyance but it sustains the women through various Central Ohio crises, none earth-shatteringly surprising but some more serious than others.
Later on, the play extends chronologically to ask how we can spend so much impassioned time with someone at a point in our lives — — only to lose touch and mutual empathy as the years spool by or jobs take us somewhere else. That’s an interesting thing to think about in the theater, burdened as that question is by the inevitable ravages on our psyches by the passage of time.
And as I looked around in the dark at this Manhattan Theatre Club production, I could see audience members appreciating that these performers’ facility for sharing subtext allowed them to become lost in their own thoughts and memories. I intend that as a compliment to the work of both Auburn and these two highly accomplished stage performers, both very much present.
That said, you don’t always feel like there is enough here at risk for a truly memorable show, even as classily directed by Daniel Sullivan on a set designed by John Lee Beatty. Auburn has structured the often melancholy piece as a duologue; the two women are gently competing to tell their stories to the audience, almost entirely in narrative form.
That’s probably a shrewd, star-friendly move; these days, audience members are less willing to do the work to understand new plays and fresh characters. That’s because of the time we all now spend watching Season 8, or whatever, of a series filled with characters we already know. That’s a big problem for new plays in American theater right now
That said, I prefer Auburn’s traditional dramas, which include the stunning “Proof,” to this one, penned in a mode not unlike Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside,” a critically acclaimed piece also told by a self-dramatizing academic. But that Rapp show had more tension and a shocker built in. “Summer, 1976? eschews such theatrics and relies instead on depicting the unconscious human struggle against mortality, asking the audience the question as to why we don’t have much constancy in how we prioritize who will be our fellow travelers to the grave. Would we not be happier if we did?
It’s a good question from Auburn, even if Linney and Hecht were mostly but not entirely diving deep inside it, at least at the performance I saw. Diana and Alice are occasionally unreliable narrators, a repeated device that Auburn carries perhaps a bit too far. Certainly, it breaks some of the spell of empathy and shared experience, which may well have been fully intentional. A tilt toward a crucial spark, then, but not as helpful as really catching summer heat.
At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York; www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
