“I didn’t like her kids, actually,” says Diana.
Diana’s discomfort is partly strategic. It protects her from possible harm caused by others approaching. But her vulnerable, perfectionist exterior hides a deep well of insecurity and loneliness in her, and a reserve of compassion more generous than we can imagine.
Alice in a flowing peasant dress (costume by Linda Cho) is the sort of woman with a fluttery, sweet voice who is routinely underrated. But she’s smarter than she lets on, resilient, and, like Hecht’s brilliant performance, brilliantly cunning. She’s married to Doug, an economist, and spends her summers obsessed with paperwork. Invested in believing that she is happy and that she is happy in her marriage, Alice cares for Holly, basks in the sun in her modest home garden, and indulges in best-selling paperbacks.
One such novel is Robin Cook’s “coma‘, which wasn’t released until 1977, is a slight, seemingly calculated cheat on Auburn’s part in an otherwise scrupulous show about period accuracy. (For shining examples, see Diana’s impeccable turquoise eyelids, and her hair styled by Annemarie Bradley and Alice’s by Jasmine Burnside.)
The medical thriller Coma is also about a woman who faces sexist resistance as she ventures into the world of a predominantly male profession. The play does not fall into this. It’s just a signal that’s there to pick up.
But Alice and Diana met through a campus childcare co-op that Doug designed as an economic model, and have seen their creative and career ambitions go mad. I belong to a generation of women who used their freedoms pre-Roe v. Wade. Still, there remained the practical issue of pregnancy permanently reordering lives, and the deep-seated expectation that married women put their husbands’ careers first.
