Key pleasure from Summer 1976 comes from listening to a speech by Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht. The two of them – how have they not worked side by side before? — to have different tools and be able to use them so well. Linney has an assertive alto, while Hecht has a more subtle and sinuous timbre, alto and oboe. I’d love to see them play any number of two-act parts (from Glinda Hecht to Elphaba Linnaeus?), but in David Auburn’s gentle but wise piece, they’ve found a piece of beautiful chamber music they can duet with. accurate.

The scale of this performance is deliberately kept small, miniature painting: Auburn introduces us to Diana (Linnie) and Alice (Hecht) as they exchange monologues, both reminiscing about 2003 or so during the summer in Columbus, Ohio, where they became friends as young mother. Diana is richer and more shy, a single mother, an art professor with a studio in which she refuses to let the kids play, while Alice is a “sleepy-eyed little hippie” (according to Diana) and a bit of a drug addict who is married to a young economist from state of Ohio. Auburn creates the dynamics of oil and water as circumstances needing each other to look after each other emulsify them. Their daughters immediately become friends, but become closer more slowly. Diana appears to be more sexually liberated, happily encouraging Alice to continue flirting with the graduate student who is painting her house, while Alice appears to be more quivering. They don’t shock when they find out about the other person, but they register deeply because the text is at the characters’ eye level. Auburn hands Hecht a line, which she, as one of our best jokes, offers gracefully: “I mean, it’s obvious now, but at the time it seemed like a big revelation, I was young — that people are not not one thing. “. This no, well which, considered with such care, is also That’s for sure.

The spell that Summer 1976 the cast depends on how Linney and Hecht tune the audience into the play’s soft, mournful frequency. I could imagine that things wouldn’t freeze if you weren’t in the mood to accept it, but their execution locked me in. Linnie is predictably good in a role that plays in the style she likes, the collected woman fraying to the edges. Over the past decade, she has performed regularly at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, giving these kinds of performances (with varying degrees of success). Here she brings out humor as well as Diana’s libido, which undermines her confidence. She is a person with all the hard assertions of youth that must be refuted in her time, a sweet snob who, in a funny part of that era, cannot bear to have Alice read something so philistine as shogun. Hecht might be a less appropriate name (I feel sorry for you if you didn’t chuckle with glee when she briefly appeared on succession), but Alice turns out to be a richer role. At first she appears to be a space cadet, often looking for a chance to smoke a joint and pass out from Diana, but we soon learn that getting married at such a young age put a stop to her own academic career (she read all sorts of serious novels, but only prefers beach reads) and left her without a purpose. Linnie comes into play to play Alice’s husband, putting on an absent-minded growl of a smug professor in scenes where the two of them talk about their marriage, letting you see a dynamic that has clearly stopped working. As Alice, Hecht always shrugged, but communicated a lot with these gestures—both rook to the audience, as if to say, “Isn’t that bullshit?” and tries to convince himself of his own resignation. You understand, she is serenely frivolous, like a defense mechanism.

These scenes between Alice and her husband also allow Hecht and Linnie to play ping pong with each other, something they lack during monologues separately. Daniel Sullivan, the director, sits them on either side of the table as they exchange speeches that lull you into an all-too-predictable rhythm right from the start. Things get livelier when one of the women interrupts or contradicts the other’s monologue, or when they slip into the scene as they describe it, as happens during the trip to the furniture warehouse where Diana buys Alice a desk. (Yes, this is a game in which buying a table is an important plot development.) We know they’ve drifted apart from the start, but Auburn wisely resists turning things into a higher and less naturalistic tenor of drama. The reveal, which isn’t entirely unexpected, comes near the end, along with a jump into the present, and the game tightens up as it gets bigger and more soulful. We are briefly treated to shimmery music (Greg Pliska) and some projections on John Lee Beatty’s overly garish 1970s set. But he never strays off course. Auburn brings the action back to the small but still big issue of having and then losing a friendship.

Scale Summer 1976 makes it easy to quit. I joked with a friend that it was like Linnie and Hecht decided to put on a play in their backyard without realizing that a bunch of Manhattan Theater Club members were watching. I wonder if the play would fit better in a small house? recorded as an audiobook too, and probably will do well when Linney and Hecht are so close to your ears, but in the midst of a string of non-subtle spring openings, it was a relief to watch something as specific as this on Broadway. (Even something based on great performance, like Great face increases to 11.) Everything doesn’t have to be some big event. It is enough that Diana and Alice both seem to be real people with dense and fully realized stories, and that they are played with such care by such thoughtful actors. They don’t experience anything grandiose or devastating, but the play offers the challenge of sitting still, meeting them at their level, and viewing what is big from that perspective.

Summer 1976 located at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.