SUMMER, 1976, by David Auburn. Read by Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht.
Plays do not ordinarily lend themselves well to audiobooks. To sieve only the sound of a performance is to miss out on a world of visual and atmospheric cues, from body language to lighting to set design, not to mention audience reaction. Yet audio turns out to be the ideal way to experience “Summer, 1976,” a memory play by David Auburn that opened earlier this year at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New York.
The veteran actresses Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, reprising their stage roles, portray Diana and Alice, two women looking back at an unlikely friendship formed over one summer decades past. When they first meet, they immediately dismiss each another. Diana, who teaches art at the nearby Ohio State University, writes off Alice, a housewife, as a “sleepy-eyed little hippie” who “just thought she was unconventional because her house was messy.” She even struggles to say the name of Alice’s daughter, Holly, without hacking up a hairball. Alice, in turn, initially judges Diana to be “uptight,” but she grudgingly revises her opinion when Diana accepts her offer of weed on their daughters’ play date.
All this and more — including how one of the women exploits a loophole in her husband’s babysitting co-op — Auburn chooses to narrate to his audience in retrospect, rather than re-enacting it. Monologue predominates over dialogue. Onstage, this was a setback: Too much narration makes for stasis. But the audiobook, which allowed my ears to pilot the plane of my senses, offered a different experience. Linney’s and Hecht’s lissome voices became charged with all the intimacy of confession. In audio form, the memories of 1976 have found their perfect medium.
‘Summer, 1976’
Listen to a clip from “Summer, 1976.”
SUMMER, 1976 | By David Auburn | Read by Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht | Audible Originals | 1 hour, 25 minutes
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