“She muttered something about Paul Klee as we talked about my work… I was surprised that she knew him.” – Diana, Summer, 1976 by David Auburn
Every now and then, someone you just met will drop a reference that makes you regard them in a totally different light. Maybe you discover that your literature professor has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Pittsburgh Steelers, or your auto mechanic turns out to be a big fan of nineteenth-century Russian novelists.
Early in David Auburn’s two-woman play Summer, 1976, free-spirited Alice surprises intellectual, academic painter Diana with a casual reference to the work of Paul Klee. The references to Klee continue throughout the play, becoming a point of reference between the characters and the audience. It is the moment that Diana begins to realize that there is more to this “hippie housewife” than she assumed based on Alice’s messy house and traditional marriage.
Klee (pronounced “clay”) was a Swiss-German artist tied to numerous groundbreaking 20th-century movements and styles, from expressionism to cubism to surrealism. In the early 1900s, Klee and his contemporaries freed themselves of realism and any obligation to accurately represent objects and environments from the real world. Along with Picasso and other turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists, Klee contributed to a form of art that would come to be known as “abstraction.”
In his 1920 “Creative Credo” Klee declared: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” Audiences watching Summer, 1976 might connect Klee’s credo to the play in any number of ways, including the storytelling approach of the show itself: on a simple but beautifully textured set, two women (extraordinary actresses Holly Twyford and Kate Eastwood Norris) describe a time and place and the events that shaped their lives during it, igniting the imaginations and sympathies of audience members not in spite of, but because of, the abstract simplicity of this unique production.
Summer, 1976 is now running at Studio Theatre through January 5, 2025. Tickets are available at studiotheatre.org.
