1976. An Ohio college town. The second wave of feminism is cresting. Two very different women are thrown together through a faculty babysitting co-op and an unlikely friendship forms between Diana, a fiercely iconoclastic artist, and Alice, a free-spirited yet naive young housewife. Summer, 1976 is written by Pulitzer winner David Auburn (Proof) with Paula Plum, recipient of the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence making her CST directorial debut. She is joined by Elliot Norton Award-winning actors Lee Mikeska Gardner and Laura Latreille as Diana and Alice. In the course of 90 minutes, we are brought directly into their memories and the small moments that change the course of their lives in this funny and poignant play The New York Times praises as “sharply observant…subtly, insistently feminist.”
SUMMER, 1976 by David Auburn
directed by Paula Plum November 6 – 30, 2025
From Page to Stage: Exploring the adaptation of the novel, Mr g: A Novel about theCreation, for the stage
Please join us for a Pre-Show Saturday Symposium with Dramaturg Sara Bookin-Weiner and Scientist Alan Lightman, author of the novel Mr g !
Sara Bookin-Weiner is a Boston-based dramaturg who works as the Manager of Outreach at the New Center for Arts and Culture, a nonprofit that explores the Jewish imagination through its programs (www.newcenterboston.org). Sara also serves on the Stage Source Gender Parity Task Force, the One Boston Initiative steering committee, and as a member-at-large on the board of the Association for Jewish Theater. She earned her MFA in dramaturgy from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in 2011.
Alan Lightman, a Mass Humanities Scholars for Mr g, received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. He has received four honorary degrees. From 1974 to 1976, Mr. Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell. During this period, he began publishing poetry in small literary magazines. He was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard from 1976 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1989 a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989, Mr. Lightman was appointed professor of science and writing, and senior lecturer in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. In 2004, Mr. Lightman cofounded the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater (one of the resident companies at Central Square Theater). Mr. Lightman’s novel international bestseller, Einstein’s Dreams, spawned more than two dozen independent theatrical and musical productions, including a production by the Catalyst Collaborative and Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge in April 2007, which, like Mr g, was adapted and directed by Wesley Savick.
Design: Jules Talbot
