Midcentury Modern: “Summer, 1976” at WHAT

Anything Daisy Walker directs is bound to be interesting, insightful, and often surprising; and Summer, 1976, now at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, absolutely doesn’t disappoint.

We can all look back on our lives and see various relationships that bloom and then fade; it’s less often that we take the time and effort—and introspection—to question why: why they started, why they developed, why they didn’t last.

That’s not the situation for Alice (Annie Meisels) and Diana (Jennifer Van Dyck), who start the play taking turns explaining to the audience in no uncertain terms why they didn’t like each other on sight, despite being compelled to spend time together due to their daughters’ friendship.

Alice—with Carole King hair and a flowered midi-dress—dropped out of graduate school to marry a professor and become a mother; she sees herself as liberated and bohemian, yet she’s tied down to her family’s shaky economic situation and conventional gender roles. Diana, dressed in serviceable jeans and shirt, is an artist, a financially comfortable single mother who sees herself as witty, intellectual, and all-around pretty amazing when compared to Alice—which she’s initially quick to do.

Gradually, though, the two women develop a tenuous friendship, though the comparisons they make between their lives never really stop. Alice is in awe of Diana’s midcentury modern art-obsessed home and casual cassoulet; Diana has fantasies about Alice’s student handyman and, absurdly, envies her wading pool.

At the same time, each of them challenges the other’s assumptions and brings out new compassion in the other. “People just aren’t one thing,” says Alice when Diana criticizes her choice of reading material and she retorts that she knows the difference between Middlemarch and Coma. And Diana is able finally to confess that she never completed her own art degree, nor can she do anything with her half-finished paintings faintly reminiscent of Paul Klee. Yet slowly each one starts realizing how much she values the other’s presence, and when both in turn go through a crisis… they try to be there for each other.

Perhaps that’s the most spectacular aspect to the play: the imperfection of their efforts to be not only comfortable in their own skin, but also to understand the dialect and demands of friendship. Both women seem to be trying to speak in a language they’d only learned superficially but now need to use daily, and they sometimes get it right, and sometimes… don’t. It’s fascinating to watch them try.

The pace changes in the last scenes as years start whipping by. Diana offers the audience a rich ending to their story, then confesses, “Of course, that didn’t happen.” Both lives are upended and the attachment they have to each other cannot finally outlive the realities of distance, changed circumstances, different priorities. There is no pretty bow to tie it all together in the end, just an awkward accidental meeting sprinkled with platitudes; they do have the sense, however, to not propose staying in better touch. There’s a certain sense of emptiness at the ending as they reach Gertrude Stein’s inevitable conclusion that there’s no longer any there, there.

The story is told mainly through monologues, allowing the audience to enter into the characters’ minds as they narrate, explain, and analyze each other, their feelings, and ongoing events. In fact, they speak mostly to the audience rather than engaging in dialogue together, which allows us to hear everything: not just what they tell each other, but also what they choose not to tell, and those gaps—along with playwright David Auburn’s sharp writing—keep their relationship enigmatic even as it is developing, flowering, and even ending.

Kevin Judge’s scene design allows for full use of the Julie Harris stage: the spaces around and above the actors ironically emphasize the isolation and intimacy we’re seeing in their relationship. The overall impression of midcentury art is every-present in the few furnishings, the somewhat mysterious and alluring grand-scale artwork, even the doorway (which in fact they seldom use), while shifts in Patricia Nichols’ lighting set the mood and tenor of scene changes.

The acting is simply superb. Meisels and Van Dyck show their differences in every way: their physicality, their gestures, their voices, their expressions. They make the audience believe in their hesitation to embrace friendship and their tentative reliance on it.

Could it have only happened in 1976? Perhaps not; but Auburn and Walker both prise the universal out of the specific to deliver a story that is both a little nostalgic and, in the end, oddly enlightening.

review by Jeannette de Beauvoir

photos by Michael and Suz Karchmer

August 9-31, Tuesdays-Saturdays, what.org