A mother (Blair Brown) comforts her daughter (Edie Falco) in Morning Sun at the Manhattan Theatre Club.
Morning Sun by Simon Stephens is a multigenerational play about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Most of their story, both set in and serving as an homage to New York City, has been told before: mother-daughter conflicts, failed love affairs, and childhood friendships that don’t stand the test of time. Stephens has crafted fast-paced, staccato dialogue that moves effortlessly through decades to tell their story.
All the characters in Stephens’s densely layered play are rendered by just three actresses. Blair Brown as the mother, Edie Falco as her daughter, Charley, and Marin Ireland as Tessa, the granddaughter, inhabit not only the main characters, but subsidiary characters such as a childhood friend, husbands, and lovers. In this play it’s not so much about the arc of a story but rather a multicharacter study delivered by three female actors.
Charley (Falco) remembers one of the songs she wrote, as her mother (Brown) looks on.
Yet Stephens has added yet another layer, one that encompasses the multitude of thoughts that drove the characters to love, hate, and make the choices that they did. Stephens presents those thoughts as dialogue. What’s challenging is that in the playbill the actors are listed as 1, 2, and 3 (the script reads the same way). So, while we think of Brown and Falco as mother and daughter, for instance, they are referenced as 2 and 1. As they share a dialogue about the mother’s boyfriend, the third actor (Ireland, say) is also having a dialogue with the daughter, expressing the thoughts in the daughter’s head that she won’t say out loud. It provides rich, raw context for the dialogue.
Although the structure may sound confusing and the storyline unexceptional, under the crisp direction of Lila Neugebauer and in the nuanced acting by the three principals, it works well. The actors are attuned to the conversations, and they interject themselves into an exchange just long enough for the chatter, the thoughts in the head, to be spoken out loud.
Tessa (Marin Ireland) is comforted by her mother (Falco). Photographs by Matthew Murphy.
One standout scene comes when Charley asks her childhood friend to be the godparent to her daughter. Charley is a single parent, and her friend feels justified in telling her that it’s wrong. “I can’t be her godparent because I don’t want to be part of her life because I think her life was caused by your selfishness, and I can’t give my approval to that. I can’t.” The cruelty in her judgment, and Ireland’s delivery, is wrenching.
The evening is not without its flaws, though. The set design, by “dots,” is as confusing as the company’s name. Amid all the dialogue about the quintessential fifth-floor New York walk-up, the use of eight glass block windows at a height that would be typically found in a garden apartment is paradoxical. Sparse furnishings are pushed up against every wall, except for a side chair and ottoman just off center stage. Even the hanging light fixture is crammed into the corner.
Lap Chi Chu employed lighting from warm tones to modern LED bright white light that felt like an afterthought—just there and it changes often. It is distracting. Sadly, what is often used as definitive lighting to depict one’s transition from this life to the afterlife is used twice, making the second—and more important—use anticlimactic. The sound design by Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger randomly applied a reverb to some of the dialogue, which was confusing and seemingly unnecessary.
Ireland, Brown and Falco work seamlessly as an ensemble: each has a keen awareness of what the others are doing at all times, and all three performers show precise timing in joining a conversation when they’re expressing a character’s thoughts. They are three talented, extraordinary women who know how to bring subtlety to a single word.
Morning Sun runs through Dec. 19 at the Manhattan Theatre Club (131 W 55th St.). The production is one hour and 40 minutes. Performance times vary during the holiday weeks. For tickets and information, visit manhattantheatreclub.com.
