NEW YORK, NY.- Alice and Diana don’t like each other very much. Not at first. Diana, a teacher at the University of Ohio, considers Alice an intellectual lightweight and flaky. Alice, a faculty wife, finds Diana condescending.
“They are unlikely friends,” Laura Linney, who plays Diana, said with understatement.
And yet forced together for a few sticky Midwestern months by their young daughters, a relationship burgeons over kiddie pools and Popsicles. Their friendship, which will eventually burn with the blue-flame intensity of a love affair, will profoundly alter each woman’s life.
This is the substance of David Auburn’s memory play “Summer, 1976,” a febrile two-hander directed by Daniel Sullivan and starring Linney and Jessica Hecht (Alice) as women in their 50s recalling a pivotal time in their 20s. The Manhattan Theater Club production, mostly composed of daisy-chained monologues, is scheduled to open April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.
On a recent weekday morning, the two women met in an otherwise empty rehearsal room at MTC’s Midtown offices. This was a fraught moment in the process. “Week three in rehearsal for me is always a disaster, I’m so frustrated,” Linney said. And Hecht was still starring in another show, Sarah Ruhl’s “Letters From Max” at the Signature Theater. But the co-stars, dressed in drapey clothing, seemed relaxed enough.
Both are stage and screen veterans who have worked with Sullivan — Hecht long ago in “The Heidi Chronicles,” Linney most recently in “The Little Foxes” — but never together. They were learning the play by listening, raptly, to each other.
“It’s like being in a romance of sorts,” Hecht said.
Over midmorning coffee — “Sometimes there’s god, so quickly,” Linney said, quoting Tennessee Williams, when the drinks arrived — the two women discussed the play, the process and why they keep returning to the theater. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: What do you remember about 1976?
JESSICA HECHT: My mother’s divorce and her consciousness raising group.
LAURA LINNEY: I can remember wearing Corkys and feeling very cool with my Lip Smackers and my shampoo that smelled like wheat germ.
Q: What attracted you to these characters?
LINNEY: I wasn’t attracted to the character at first. I have no idea of who a character is until I’ve been working for several weeks. So for me, it was really the combination of people. If Dan Sullivan whispers my name, I’ll show up. Honestly, I will do anything that man wants me to do. And I so wanted to do it with Jess, because she is so amazing. Also, hurray for a new play!
HECHT: I never told you, but before they had officially asked me to do the play, I saw Dan on the corner of 93rd and Broadway. And he said, “Have you worked with Laura?” And I said, “No, I haven’t worked with her.” And he said, “She’s the real deal.” And it is true, because you have a clarity of purpose. We share that. For me, I’m interested in plays that talk about intimacy.
LINNEY: This was a time before cellphones, before the internet. Friendships were very deep. The effort that you would happily make to continue a relationship or a friendship! And the romance that went with not being able to have access to someone immediately.
Q: So once you’d signed on, what work has gone into building these characters?
HECHT: My approach is kind of internal. It’s really based on the language and how the story is working. It’s quite annoying.
LINNEY: No, not at all.
HECHT: I always worry that my technique annoys the other actors. Do you ever get that feeling? That this must be frustrating to the other person?
LINNEY: I love watching someone else’s process. How do you do this crazy thing that we do? Because we are all so different, it’s always exciting to see where the intersection is between the actor and the character. What is it that’s letting them in, bringing blood to the character? Like, where do they find their way in?
I’m the daughter of a playwright. So I tend to be text-based. I try to listen to what the play is telling me to do. I work on it and work on it and work on it. Then there comes a period of time where it literally lifts up off the page and it becomes a three-dimensional living thing. Then it starts to work on me. It doesn’t always happen. But it’s exciting when it does.
Q: So who are these women? Who is Alice?
HECHT: Alice has a kind of impulsivity about relating to people and an attraction to different people. That excites me. I definitely was that person.
Q: And who’s Diana?
HECHT: She’s such a mystery. She’s so complicated.
LINNEY: There’s the question of who is she really and who does she think she is. There’s a big difference between the two. She wants to be an artist. It’s important to her. It’s more than a vocation. It’s a sacred pact. And she suffers terribly for it. She is uncompromising, she is opinionated. She is astute and perceptive and diagnostic. She also doesn’t really know who she is or what she needs or what she wants.
Q: Why is this friendship so intense?
HECHT: They both really feel that need to have somebody as a partner. With Alice, Diana teaches her so much.
LINNEY: They’re attracted to the qualities that they don’t have, but that the other person has in abundance. And there’s a sense of belonging to each other. There’s a sense of family, there’s a sense of chemistry. When you click with someone, it’s really powerful.
HECHT: Being friends with Diana is almost like having an affair, it changes Alice’s whole metabolism.
LINNEY: You’re chemically altered. And you’re spiritually rearranged.
Q: You’re about four weeks into rehearsal, what have you learned about the play?
HECHT: Yesterday we did our first run of the play without our books in hand. And it was so scary, but we got through.
LINNEY: We’re learning a lot. I don’t think any of us have pretensions that we have all the answers. Maybe that’s the one thing that shows how long we’ve been doing this. If you’re too knowing, there’s no room for growth.
Q: What’s the joy and terror of a two-hander, of having to rely so much on each other?
LINNEY: The joy is the intimacy and the bond and that you’re not alone up there. There’s a total interdependence. The biggest fear is that I won’t be able to help her if she gets into trouble.
HECHT: Yeah, that we would let the other person down.
LINNEY: The language is very difficult. We never stop talking. We’re going to mess up. We’re human beings. There’s just the fear that we will mess up in a way that derails the show.
Q: You both have spent a lot of your career on television. What keeps you returning to the theater?
HECHT: I feel very, very committed to our community. Being part of this community is definitely the biggest accomplishment of my professional life. I feel a tremendous amount of energy and human connection to the people I act with and the people I act for. Nothing else replicates that.
LINNEY: It’s a family profession. I have a history with it that goes beyond me. I also strongly believe that it is a part of public good. Theater provides a nourishment, intellectually and emotionally and spiritually, to audiences. And I love the ritual. There is a connection to the work that’s much deeper than anything you can do on television and film. Because we are doing it from beginning to end, eight shows a week.
HECHT: It is a religion. Someone said to me the other day, “Oh, that is my religion. Being in the theater.”
LINNEY: People ask me, “What church did you grow up in?” I’m like, “The theater.” Everything that’s important about life I’ve learned in the theater.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
