“One eye sees, the other feels.” —Paul Klee
“What made our discussions so powerful was the sense we had that a great floodlight had been turned onto the world; it was as though all the murky and scary shadows we had been living with all our lives were suddenly wiped away.”
—Feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman, about the Consciousness Raising Circles she participated in during the 1970s.
Towards the end of David Auburn’s Summer, 1976, friends Diana and Alice attend a Paul Klee retrospective that traces Klee’s work through its phases and motifs. Summer, 1976, spans both the eponymous 1976 and the decades following; the Klee retrospective is an imagined 2003 MoMA show. Director Vivienne Benesch conceptualizes Studio’s production of Auburn’s play similarly: A kind of retrospective of a friendship, broken into distinct parts that showcase both the chapters and sweep of this relationship.
It’s a friendship that has a rocky start. The women are very different from each other: We meet them as single parent Diana, an artist with a well-appointed house and extensive knowledge of art and design, and stay-at-home mom Alice, who’s spending the summer overseeing a grad student painting her house and her five-year-old’s dips in an inflatable pool. The women meet through a babysitting co-op but end up seeing each other often once their daughters form the steadfast bond of lively five-year-olds.
Auburn spent his own childhood in Columbus, Ohio during the mid-1970s; is mother founded a babysitting co-op similar to the one that brings Diana and Alice together. Although he was initially inspired by events that happened to fall in this period, he came to appreciate the particular aptness grounding Alice and Diana’s transformative friendship in 1976—America’s Bicentennial. “That summer started to feel like exactly the right setting,” Auburn says. “Partially because of the bicentennial and its metaphor of independence, people discovering or rediscovering the meaning of independence for themselves. But more generally, I had a sense of people exploring new possibilities in that period, and women in particular reexamining the nature of their lives at the time.”
Auburn’s script is tantalizing, offering the intimacy of direct address from each character while leaving space for them to tell the audience—and themselves—the not-quite truth about their own motivations and emotions (“Not that I care all that much.”) The structure offers—as Klee himself once said about the interplay of observation and interpretation—one eye for seeing and one eye for feeling, the space to describe what is in front of you alongside the necessity of articulating the particular emotional relevance of that object, a person, or a moment in time to transmute fact into meaning.
As a retrospective, Auburn offers snapshots of the friendship as it develops into an unexpected if complicated lifeline for each woman. But the introspection leaves space for each character to view their friendship from their late middle age as well, inviting the audience to witness the double-sided gift of accumulating decades with another person—which is to say, being seen by someone who trained the heat of a floodlight on you, and showed you’re your truth with both eyes.