
Ross Zentner
Heidi Armbruster and Colleen Madden (from left) in "Summer, 1976."
Heidi Armbruster and Colleen Madden (from left) in "Summer, 1976," Forward Theater Company, 2025.
“We became friends, as you often do, through our children.”
That kind of offhand remark could diminish a relationship between two women — rendering it a friendship of convenience, a playground courtship.
Instead, it’s the starting point for Summer, 1976, a tight two-hander by David Auburn and Forward Theater Company’s current production, playing at the Overture Center Playhouse through Feb. 16.
It’s also the starting point of a short-lived but significant friendship between the play’s two characters, Diana and Alice, an intimacy that unspools quickly over just a few months one summer and fades away — but not without imprinting indelibly on each woman’s life.
As we first encounter them, Diana and Alice share the fact of their motherhood in common — and that’s about all. Diana seems uptight, prone to smart kitten heels and PBS programming, a contrast to Alice’s sandals, prairie dresses and woven purse full of pot. But because their daughters become fast friends, the women are thrust together through a shared need for childcare.
The play is short, running about 90 minutes with no intermission. It mostly spans, as its title suggests, just one summer, in Columbus, Ohio, but is bookended by a reunion nearly 30 years later. The characters move seamlessly between present reenactment and retrospective remembrance.
By unfolding through time in this way (an Auburn specialty, as I’ve described in this publication before) Diana and Alice describe their lives from different angles, revealing conflicting memories and experiences and the kinds of small misunderstandings that can send a relationship off-kilter.
At first, Diana and Alice take quick stock of one another, and don’t like what they see. To Diana, Alice is a faux hippie in a retrograde, traditional marriage. To Alice, Diana is a snob. But over a joint one day — courtesy of Alice, and I’m still wondering how props designer Kaya Sarajian nailed that nostalgic smell — they connect over the pleasure of high-end munchies, courtesy of Diana.
And it turns out they share more than motherhood. Both are struggling with what it means to be happy and how to assert creative ambitions. But their circumstances are different. Diana is an ambitious artist and single mother, while Alice is essentially a bohemian housewife. (Though is she bohemian, Diana muses acerbically, or just messy?)
Auburn’s script takes seriously the way that female friendship sometimes solidifies through, and sometimes strains under, small intimacies. Alice nurses Diane through a migraine. Diane tends to Alice through marital challenges.
One night, the women and their daughters watch fireworks explode in celebration of the American Bicentennial, the 200-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a nod to the ways in which white, middle-class women of the era were themselves grappling with the promised freedoms of second-wave feminism. Thankfully, Auburn doesn’t hit us over the head with that connection. Instead, the question plays out as we learn more about each woman.
Auburn likewise makes no explicit references to Roe vs. Wade, the landmark decision from three years before the summer in question — and, quick math determines, two or three years after both women became pregnant. Diana’s pregnancy was an accident. Alice’s derailed her education. Might they have made other choices if given the option? The play leaves that question unasked and unanswered, but it hovers in the air in a story about women daydreaming about different futures.
Diana can claim some kind of familial independence, having kicked the father of her child, a college fling, to the curb after just a few dates. Alice, by contrast, is entirely financially dependent on her husband, Doug, an economist scrambling to earn tenure. Her plan for the summer is to read novels and get stoned, while keeping a vague eye on her daughter and another on the grad student painting their home.
But Diana’s lifestyle is somewhat lavish. Her home is tastefully outfitted in expensive, well-considered furniture and art, and she teaches at the same school as Alice’s husband. But little revelations, about family money and squandered ambition — stemming from a deep aversion to finishing things — suggest she’s weighed down, too.
These differences in presentation mask a shared disappointment over lost dreams. Diana’s are more clearly expressed in her half-finished canvases and a few poignantly shared fantasies. But Alice refers to a semester at Iowa and shelves full of classic literature. One day, she chooses to bring home a lavish desk with all the enthusiasm of buying an overpriced planner on New Year’s Day — a totem of boundless creative futures ahead. (And like a planner abandoned by February, the desk quickly becomes buried by household detritus, unused even for paying bills.)
One other commonality the women share — an affinity for the art of Paul Klee, a German expressionist known for playing with color and symbols. The scenic design by Jason Fassi incorporates this art into the scenery, overlaid with stark 1970s geometry. The only set is a modular orange bench that probably marked many middle-class living rooms of that era.
Maybe this was in part because I’d stepped in from a chilly Madison January night, but I found myself wishing the staging better captured a languid Midwestern summer day. A small stage deep in the Overture Center is a difficult space in which to recreate endless Ohio skies, but I found the cozy space too interior in a play that balances desires for freedom with obligation.
The night that I saw the show, Heidi Armbruster played Diana and Colleen Madden played Alice. Each is well-suited for their respective character’s bearings and mannerisms — so well-suited, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in their place.
But this production alternates roles. Depending on which day you go, Armbruster could be Alice and Madden Diana. One imagines that this means each actress is carrying both women within her in some way, each with her own ambitions, shames, disappointments and yearnings.
It’s a clever illustration of a startling realization that comes to Diana, with the wisdom of youth: “People aren’t just one thing.”