Tony Roberts (left) is David, a retired college professor married to one of four sisters, and John Rubinstein is his brother-in-law Carl, his favorite family member, in Paul Osborn’s Morning’s At Seven.
Paul Osborn’s play Morning’s At Seven is one of theater’s great rescues. A flop on Broadway in 1939, it was resurrected in 1980 by director Vivian Matalon, whose peerless production established it as a classic piece of Americana. It’s a gentle satire on small-town life, with busybodies and petty jealousies and snobbery, and although it’s as sturdily constructed as a Chekhov play, it’s not as dark. There may be conflicts, but the characters have more fun—and are fun to be around.
Patty McCormack (left) is Esther, and Lindsay Crouse plays her sister Cora.
Harry Feiner’s set of adjacent clapboard homes that shelter three of four sisters evokes an innocent era, 1922. In one house live Cora and her husband, Thor, as well as Cora’s spinster sibling Aaronetta (Arry). In the other are sister Ida and her husband, Carl. Their son, Homer (Jonathan Spivey), is about to arrive with Myrtle (Keri Safran), the woman he’s been dating for 12 years and engaged to for seven. Homer has decided that it’s time to introduce her to his family.
Myrtle works hard to impress everyone, but she walks unwittingly into several family crises. John Rubinstein’s mysterious and anguished Carl, who once dreamed of being a dentist, is edging toward one of his “spells.” The family is used to them, but his sisters-in-law Cora (Lindsay Crouse) and Esther (Patty McCormack) are concerned:
Cora: Oh, I think he’ll be all right. It’s just one of those dentist spells.
Esther: Well, it’s only one step from a dentist spell to a “Where am I?” spell, you know.
There’s additional tension for Esther, who lives a block or so away with her husband, David, a retired college professor. David has barred all visits to her family because, Homer says, he “thinks we’re morons.”
Dan Lauria plays Thor in Paul Osborn’s classic. Photographs by Maria Baranova.
As the characters struggle through quotidian mishaps, as well as long-simmering resentments, they are both individual and universal. The script has plenty of grinning comedy, but it also lays bare the suffocating surveillance of small-town life. Homer suffers from the oppressiveness of his family and the town: he balks at calling out the Scouts to search for Cora when she briefly goes missing—a scene that provides one of the funniest lines in the show. He is also terrified that the family will learn that he and Keri Safran’s squeaky-voiced, fidgety Myrtle have been having sex all these years. But the painfully shy nebbish is nonetheless fighting his way toward independence; the weekend is clearly meant as his breakaway moment.
Crouse’s long-suffering Cora has also reached a turning point: aware for decades that Arry has carried a torch for Dan Lauria’s empathetic Thor, Cora plans a showdown. And Esther, by her very presence among her sisters, has called David’s bluff.
Alma Cuervo is Ida, who lives next door to two of her sisters.
Director Dan Wackerman steers clear of making the characters and their foibles too quaint—a job that Barbara A. Bell’s costumes do well enough. The crises are consequential. Rubinstein shows that Carl’s angst can be quelled by the attentions of Tony Roberts’s dry, haughty David, who considers Carl the only person of his family who’s not an irredeemable moron. As Esther, McCormack deftly displays both wisdom and a steely disposition that she hides under a fun-loving exterior—she really is the only fit match for David. A late replacement, Alley Mills does a fine job of showing Arry’s frustration, even ruthlessness, but Mills had not yet come off book for the second half, which didn’t jell as well at the press performance, but no doubt soon will.
Alma Cuervo as Ida flutters with motherly concern. Late in the play, she and Spivey have a poignant scene about his dream home, which has slipped away. “What’s it all about that I’m forty years old and still living here and not having a home of my own?” the anguished Homer asks his mother. “But that’s what you’ve always wanted, Homer,” says Ida. “Why have I wanted it?” he answers. “I’m a man.” Osborn’s play is about the trap of settling for less than what one yearns for and the social pressures that can sidetrack one’s dreams.
Perhaps most important, it’s not a downer. The title comes from a cheery Robert Browning poem that ends, “God’s in His heaven/All’s right with the world.” Morning’s At Seven is an optimistic parable for this American moment. It shows how a family that’s sometimes at loggerheads might still be able to care about one another and get along.
Morning’s At Seven runs through Jan. 9 at Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 W. 46th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and at 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday. (Holiday schedules may differ: for tickets and information, call (212) 239-6200 or visit MorningsAt7.com).
