[Summer] is less tightly focused, less dramaturgically clever, less sentimentally charming than Leonard's other play, Da…. But Summer has gentle virtues of its own.

A group of middle-aged people sit on the grass, thinking long, wistful thoughts about their lives, and a couple of young ones voice their hopes for the future: Summer has this in common with the second act of The Cherry Orchard. But in Leonard's Ireland there is no sound of a far-off breaking string to indicate the end of an old way of life and the beginning of a new one. His characters, like Chekhov's in Uncle Vanya rather than The Cherry Orchard, are not swept up in social change but trapped in aimlessness and mediocrity. (p. 386)

Summer is an Irish play that does not harp upon its Irishness. Its themes are Chekhov's themes: the baffling way in which life fails to make good on promises and expectations; the way people deteriorate as time works on them; the vague sense of something missing. They are old themes, but they bear repeating, and Leonard deals sensitively with them. Individual souls are not deeply probed, but the changing interrelationships among them are often finely rendered. There are a few rough edges in the dramaturgy: awkward transitions, monologues that sound a little too much like monologues, a climactic revelation (about adultery) that is a little too obviously climactic. But there is shrewd understanding in Leonard's depiction of the aftermath of that revelation: nearly everyone refuses to admit that they have heard what they have heard, that they know what they know, and things are patched up, as things so often are.

Sad as it is, the play is not depressing; there is a pensive sweetness in the open air…. Moreover, the author finds room for comedy as the characters interact: they are Irish, after all….

Summer has nothing really new to say, and no spectacular new ways of saying it, but it amused, interested, touched me: it both renewed and consoled my sense of the sadness of ordinary lives, including my own. (p. 387)