Berkshires arts reviews

Aug. 4, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Paul Osborn’s “Morning at Seven,” now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival under Vivian Matalon’s inspired direction, is probably the funniest play of the season with the audience repeatedly a-roar. And the joy is that it is not just a couple of comic characters bringing them to us. All nine characters in this play concerning tangled relationships in a dysfunctional family living in middle American in 1922 are hilarious and endearing.

The cast of Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of Morning’s at Seven. Photo by Kevin Sprague.The setting—an absolutely beautiful one (designer, R. Michael Miller) consists of two twin-like, mirror-imaged white clapboard sided houses. Our view is of their back porches, and flower bedecked lawns and the narrow alley, leading to the street, that separates them. Great trees, probably elms, overhang the houses, and the trunk of one, because of its frequent use, becomes almost a 10th character. (A use I deliberately withhold; it must be seen, and I don’t intend to spoil your fun.)

The plot centers around four sisters, all now roughly seventy (but with a distinct pecking order) who have lived side by side (or a block away) for almost fifty years. Of the eight family members in the play, six occupy the two houses and two others are just down the block off stage.

Aaronetta, the only spinster, has lived all her adult life in the house on the left with her sister Cora and Cora’s husband Theodore. In the house on the right sister Ida has lived with her husband Carl and their son Homer, a mamma’s boy and still a recalcitrant bridegroom at age 40, it seems forever. A few blocks down the street lives Esther and her husband David, who feeling himself cerebrally “above” the family even tries to keep his wife from seeing them.

Myrtle, the only “outsider” is brought on the scene by Homer, an event that sets the plot spinning and a mad rushing in and out of back doors, up and down alleys, and the poking of heads out windows. Although no one has ever met Myrtle, Homer has dated her for twelve years, and considered himself engaged to her for the past five. She is 39 and her biological clock is ticking.

Each of the characters has his/her own eccentricity, and in many cases secrets unshared and anxieties unvoiced—until life explodes about them. And before the play is over one loves (or forgives) each one of them, foibles included. Each is perfectly cast. The hair styles of the women, making them possess a sort of tragic beauty in their aging, and is so exactly of the period as are the clothes of both the men and women.

All of the characters are well cast and their ensemble playing is charming as well as constantly entertaining..

Aaronetta (Joyce Van Patton) is tall, imposing, dignified but very inquisitive and lonely. She makes a decisive decision at the play’s end that involves a big change in several lives.

Cora (Lucy Martin) is thin, extremely agile for one of her age, and desperate to live alone in a house with her husband.

Ida (Debra Jo Rupp) is the harassed wife of a husband who has spells about taking the wrong fork in life’s journey. She also copes with a son who hasn’t the courage to leave the nest. And she is possibly even more agile than Cora.

Esther (Anita Gillette) is the calmest and seemingly sanest (although she does have the advantage of living off stage, but with a husband who is normally will not deign to consort with her kin. She has the greatest charm. (Her role was once played by Maureen Stapleton.)

All four, faces so young in the program bios, present us with believable aged women.

And then there is Myrtle (Christanne Tisdale) determined to capture the corpulent (and no great prize) Homer. She looks her 39 years and works mightily to drag necessary words from her reluctant suitor. Her facial contortions are indescribable.

These women’s lives are central and it is in their lives, more than those of the men that this play (written an directed by men) brings out the poignancy, the secret fears, hopes, dreams, and memories of women. Society has limited their roles. There are moving lines full of unfulfilled dreams and a willingness to out-live death.

But there is sympathy for the male characters as well, as deeply troubled in their own ways. And the four male cast members, bewildered as they might be by the woman’s near hysteria, have problems of their own and are just as well cast.

Theodore (Paul Hecht) is retired , seems rational, easy going, keeps the garden growing, is obliging, trying to calm the waters, and has put behind him a past lapse, dutifully supporting his wife’s sister for years..

David (David Greene) who, although he seems to have married the least hysterical of the sisters, finds her family beneath his exalted philosophical concepts and expounds great truths which he himself does not understand.

Carl (Jonathan Hogan) the most eccentric of the men is the most charming. His “spells” are worrisome to all the sisters who all fly into action when Carl suddenly pines for the fork he did not take, the dentist he did not become. On the other hand, when needed he can grab his tools and stay up all night, as unapt a plumber as in any of the other roles he never found for himself.

And then there is Homer (Kevin Carolin) slow-witted, over-weight, a hard-to-get-through to bumbler, whom a change in the pattern the wall-paper in his (since childhood) bedroom would probably be a crisis. But who when Myrtle finally makes a connection faces a possibility of understanding at last!

Perhaps because we are so fallible, we find these characters, super fallible, so funny and engaging. The play itself is a good one, though not a great one. But this production of it is an engaging one.

And you’ll come away loving the characters, foibles and all.

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