Some friendships belong to a particular moment in our lives. They may last only a season, yet years later we can still trace the ways they changed us. That experience lies at the heart of David Auburn’s Summer, 1976, a play about two women who meet almost by chance and come to see their lives differently through each other.
In a conversation ahead of Berkshire Theatre Group’s production, Auburn and director Isadora Wolfe reflected on how the play took shape—and on the memories, possibilities and losses that live inside a friendship.
A Story Found in Memory
Auburn did not begin with a plot in mind. He began writing monologues, placing them amid details he remembered from growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1970s. The play is not autobiographical, but that familiar world helped him discover its characters.
Auburn drew on a childhood memory of the babysitting co-op his mother ran. It gave him a starting point for Alice and Diana: two women whose children bring them into contact, though they might otherwise never have met. From that encounter, their friendship begins to grow.
As he wrote, Auburn became interested in the lasting effect of a relationship that does not necessarily last. Looking back, a person might wonder why someone who mattered so much is no longer part of their life. What was it about that friend—or about who they themselves were at the time—that changed the direction of things?
The Summer of Independence
Auburn first turned to the 1970s because he remembered them so vividly. As Alice and Diana’s story developed, the summer of 1976 came to hold another meaning. Both women are trying to define themselves: in relation to their children, to each other and to the world around them. The language of independence that filled the country during the Bicentennial echoes through their more private struggles.
The period also informs the work in the rehearsal room. Wolfe and the actors, Kate Baldwin and Jennifer Van Dyck, have spent time considering its culture, politics and the experiences of women of that generation. Auburn, too, surrounded himself with books about and from the era while writing. Those details help give Alice and Diana a world to inhabit, even as the questions raised by their friendship reach beyond it.
The Lives We Might Have Lived
When Wolfe first saw Summer, 1976 on Broadway, what stayed with her was the friendship’s effect on both women. She recognized the feeling of seeing another possible version of yourself in someone close to you: a life you might have lived if you had taken a different path. There can be grief in losing that friendship, she observed, but also in losing touch with the possibility it once represented.
That understanding shapes her approach to the production. Rather than recreate every location from the women’s shared summer, Wolfe sees the stage as an imagined, psychological space—a place where Alice and Diana’s memories can meet. The past comes alive through the act of remembering it.
The connection between the two performers is central to that vision. Baldwin and Van Dyck did not know each other before rehearsals began, so Wolfe has made room for conversation and discovery alongside their work on the play. Their growing rapport helps give texture to a friendship that must feel both unexpected and deeply consequential.
What Remains
Auburn hopes audiences will leave feeling immersed in Alice and Diana’s lives. He has found that the play often prompts people to talk about friendships of their own: the people who arrived at just the right moment, the ones whose lives briefly ran alongside theirs and the questions that remain after they parted.
Summer, 1976 offers no simple measure of a friendship’s importance. Its two women remind us that a relationship need not last forever to stay with us.
