Close Relations

By T. E. Kalem

MORNING'S AT SEVEN by Paul Osborn

This is a tale of two houses and four sisters. The time is the early 1920s, and the place is Midwestern America. The houses, with their gables and gingerbread curlicues, are hopscotch close. In their backyards unfolds a human comedy that is warm, antic, wise and utterly endearing.

Three of the sisters are in their late 60s and one is 72. In the house on the left lives Ida Bolton (Nancy Marchand), and she has two problems. One is her husband Carl (Richard Hamilton), a man given to "spells" during which he plants his forehead against the kitchen wall or a tree. In this state, Carl bemoans the fact that he has "lost the fork," meaning the fork in the road of life's choices.

Ida's second problem is her son Homer (David Rounds), who has clung to her apron strings for 40 years, not without her complicity. Homer, a man of glacial agility, is bringing Myrtle Brown (Lois de Banzie) home with him. She is a girl he has known for twelve years, dated for seven and been engaged to for five, without his parents' ever having seen her.

The house on the right is occupied by Cora Swanson (Teresa Wright), her husband Theodore, known as Thor (Maurice Copeland), and the spinster sister, Aaronetta (Elizabeth Wilson), who has lived with them for 40 years. Cora feels she can no longer bear this cross. When it develops that Aaronetta was not an inviolate spinster, at least vis-a-vis Thor, summer lightning flashes through the houses.

The eldest sister, Esther Crampton (Maureen O'Sullivan), lives down the road with David (Gary Merrill), her elitist curmudgeon of a husband, who openly reviles her siblings and their menfolk as "morons." Naturally, each sister cuts through the Gordian knot of close relations only to find it intact -- even if more loosely binding. However, Homer amusingly severs his umbilical cord.

While Morning's at Seven, now at the Lyceum Theater, first appeared on Broadway in 1939, it is not a relic from the crowded attic of nostalgia. Playwright Osborn, now 78, perceived a world with the family as its center of gravity and the blood tie as life's enduring nourishment.

In this play, he achieves the magic of the commonplace. His characters are plain-as-drain people, yet their fretful crises engage our affection and concern.

Part of that may stem from the play's lineal parentage. It surely includes Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that symbiotic study of lonely spirits in stultifying small towns seeking the mind's freedom and the heart's release. Director Vivian Matalon has sensed that aspect of the play, and his cast, wondrous in its ensemble excellence, embodies it. Whether one goes to the theater to laugh, to cry, to muse or to learn, Morning's at Seven satisfies all four appetites. --T. E. Kalem

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