‘Summer time 1976’
By means of Dec. 22
Studio Theatre
1501 14th St., N.W.
$40 – $95
Stuidotheatre.org
Nobody is only one factor.
That’s a sometimes-forgotten level made rapidly and succinctly in David Auburn’s reminiscence play “Summer time 1976.”
Now at Studio Theatre, the completely satisfying two-hander tracks the unlikely friendship of Alice (Holly Twyford) and Diana (Kate Eastwood Norris), two very totally different ladies who meet as younger moms in the course of the Bicentennial summer season.
Diana, an educator and artist, is the gimlet-eyed observer. She makes speedy, decisive judgments starting from knocking Alice’s middlebrow summer season studying (bestsellers “Shogun” and “Coma”) and impossibly messy home to negatively noting her little lady’s incessantly runny nostril and even her title – Holly.
Conversely, Alice is a laid-back stay-at-home mother, spending the summer season sunbathing within the yard, watching her daughter splash within the kiddie pool whereas Merle, a reportedly cute however unseen grad pupil, paints her home. Inside, husband Doug (additionally unseen) an economics professor at Ohio State, toils at his desk in hopes of securing tenure within the fall.
It’s the ladies’s younger daughters who convey them collectively. Throughout a play date at Diana’s studiously tasteful residence, uninhibited Alice boldly pulls out a joint, and Diana enthusiastically joins in. As the ladies play, the ladies bond over weed and Diana’s scrumptious leftover cassoulet. Alice is impressed. At this level it appears there’s nothing Diana can’t do nicely.
Telephone calls and visits ensue. They discuss life, artwork, and relationships. Alice makes it clear that she’s learn Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, and so forth.; she is aware of good literature. In reality, she was immersed in it earlier than leaving college to marry her husband. In flip, Diana comes out as a single mom buoyed by household cash. Her job isn’t notably prestigious, and all of her work stay unfinished.
For them, that well-known summer season might be marked by a sequence of occasions: there was the memorable youngsters’ first play date, a visit to Cleveland to purchase a chunk of furnishings, Diana’s vicious migraine, and numerous fireworks shows and parades. However the burgeoning relationship takes a flip when one of many ladies asks the opposite whether or not she’s joyful. Whereas the loaded inquiry doesn’t kill the friendship, it positively has a chilling impact.
Auburn, who’s finest identified for “Proof” — the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning household drama that explores the connection between brilliance and insanity — provides up an actual examination of friendship, notably ladies’s friendships at a time when the tradition was altering quickly.
The 2 characters recall and stay the moments with alternating monologues and dialogues. Generally it feels as if there are greater than two actors on stage. As an example, with only a slight change of voice and posture, Norris briefly slips into the function of Doug. Like all the pieces about this manufacturing, it’s executed with subtlety and ability.
Ever so capably staged by Vivienne Benesch (making Studio debut) with a perfectly chosen forged, the play is a pleasure to expertise. Twyford and Norris, equally adept at comedy and drama, maintain the viewers’s rapt curiosity for 90 minutes of intermission-less nonstop speak.
And the design staff is a dream. Set designer Lee Savage’s elegant imaginative and prescient features a raised circle of parquet flooring, a pair of Breuer chairs and block finish tables, all in a medium brown wooden that implies the Seventies. Backing the stage is a wall of picket squares, the right surfaces for Stefania Bulbarella’s projections of contemporary, painterly colours.
With “Summer time 1976,” out actor Twyford returns for her 14th present at Studio and marks her ninth collaboration with Norris. An excellent previous manufacturing that includes the pair involves thoughts — Folger Theatre’s “Mary Stuart” (2015), one other memorable piece by which characters are outlined by each variations and shared dissatisfactions.
Close to the play’s finish, Alice and Diana meet by likelihood at a 2003 Klee retrospective in New York. It’s a bit wistful however nothing overwrought. It’s a second for the characters and the viewers to measure friendships misplaced and located.
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