A contemporary American comedy of manners, Same Time, Next Year … [is] concerned with that most difficult of dramatic values, affection…. [It] uses an improbable plot device on which to hang reflections of the world and of jumbled private emotions: in this case the illicit meeting, for one night in every year, of a married man and a married woman briefly escaping from their own spouses and daily trials. We look in on them in a motel cabin once every five years from 1951 to 1976, catching up with changing fashions in American society, sharing their unabated family frets. It is all very lightly done by Bernard Slade…. [The] point of it all—a point more easily appreciated and more highly valued by 'ordinary' theatregoers than by metropolitan sophisticates—is the way in which, through the exchange of news and family photographs, the momentary sharing of apprehensions—far more than through sex, fun though that remains—these two build a lasting bond. (pp. 43-4)