'Morning's At Seven' has all-star cast

NEW YORK, May 17 (UPI) -- Paul Osborn's "Morning's at Seven" is one of those plays that is always worth reviving because it offers so many juicy roles for elderly actors, the kind that bring a lifetime's experience to the stage.

The Lincoln Center Theater's production of the 1939 play at the Lyceum Theater, its first Broadway revival in 22 years, is an unmitigated joy, thanks to a cast of veterans including Piper Laurie, Buck Henry, Estelle Parsons, William Biff McGuire, Frances Sternhagen, Elizabeth Franz and Christopher Lloyd. Julie Hagerty and Stephen Tobolowsky are the cast's youngsters playing characters 40 and 39 years of age, respectively.

The play is one of the American theater's classics, catching an extended American family isolated in a small Midwestern town in the late Depression years like a fly caught in amber. Time has not aged it or lessened its power to surprise and delight an audience with its evocation of life as it was once lived in these United States.

Osborn, who died in 1988 with a score of topnotch plays and screenplays to his credit, chose a quote from Robert Browning's "Pippa Passes" for a title for a drama that is an ironic twist on the poem's concluding lines, "God's in His heaven/ All's right with the world." It's a beautiful morning as he curtain rises, but the little world we are to encounter is a sixes and sevens.

Two sisters and their husbands live in the twin Queen Anne-style clapboard houses that open onto a common backyard and another sister and her husband live up the street. A fourth sister, a spinster, lives with a sister and brother-in-law in one of the onstage houses and the other household includes an unmarried son who lives with his parents. Life on the surface seems serene.

But, as director Daniel Sullivan pointed out in an interview, when someone tries to break out of the comfortable role that families have assigned them, it is bound "to cause immense dislocation of the whole structure."

"That is what happens in this play," he said. "There is a panic under the surface. It's not about 'Who am I?' but 'Where am I?"

Without revealing all of the play's secrets, it is safe to relate that the son has decided to marry his fiancée of seven years and move into a house built by an uncle. But one of his aunts has decided she wants to buy the house as a quiet retirement refuge for herself and her husband after sharing their home with the spinster sister for many years.

Another sister faces the humiliation of having her husband move to the second floor of their home, giving the downstairs to her in an arrangement that adds up to separation. And one of her brothers-in-law, a man who has "spells" and is always looking for the meaning of life, has the audacity to help her husband remodel the second floor spaced into a self-contained apartment.

The outcome of these rearrangements is that the spinster is left without a home and chooses to move in with the only household open to her -- without even asking permission. Her transfer from one house to the other, dressed as though she were embarking for Europe and carrying hatboxes, is one of the comic highlights or this unexpectedly funny play

Laurie is ideally cast as Esther, the smartest and most assertive of the sisters, exasperated by their shortcomings but loving them all the same. She is wise enough to let her separation-bent husband, an intellectual snob who looks down on her family, have his way as long as the calm tenor of her own life isn't disrupted.

Sternhagen is lovable as the nervous and not-too-bright sister, Ida, who has made a mama's boy of her son, and Parsons is an enigma as the laid-back sister, Cora, who is tired of sharing her husband with her resentful spinster sister, Aaronetta, a role taken with great sympathy by Elizabeth Franz, who knows how to reduce an audience to both tears and laughter.

Tobolowsky is outstanding as the timid bachelor, Homer, and Hagerty plays his awkward, long-suffering girlfriend, Myrtle, with a desperate and annoying desire to please her family-to-be. All the brothers-in-law, quite different in character, are played with finesse by McGuire as the amiable Thor, Lloyd as the befuddled Carl, and Henry as the disdainful David.

Sullivan's direction is flawless, and John Lee Beatty's amazingly realistic setting, with houses that look as though they are fully habitable and every leaf on the surrounding trees in place, is one of the most memorable visual creations of the current theater season, strongly enhanced by Brian MacDevitt's lighting.

Jane Greenwood's costumes are just as detailed and recall a more rigorous era of dressing than our own careless one. Indeed, the play underscores the formality that families of the mid-1900s -- even eccentric families -- tried to maintain in keeping up appearances when the very core of their circumscribed, even suffocating existences were threatened by catastrophic change.