Review of MORNINGS AT SEVEN
MORNING'S AT SEVEN
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Altarena Playhouse of Alameda is currently staging the Paul Osborn comedy: MORNING'S AT SEVEN.
While Tolstoy claimed that the lives of ordinary people were as interesting, or possibly more interesting, than the lives of aristocrats, nobility and royalty, he never wrote a story centered on a domestic, a serf, a peasant or anyone who owned less than 1000 hectares of Russian soil.
Somehow Tolstoy fought the temptation to make more interesting lives the centerpieces of his novels and continued to detail the well-appointed ennui of the landed gentry, leisure class and those who spoke French as a second language.
American playwright Paul Osborn, however, unapologetically explores the lives of the ordinary people that Thomas Gray may have reflected on in that country churchyard.
While Chekhov explored the rural lives of THREE SISTERS, Osborn takes the subject one step further and explores the lives of four sisters; all who have the genuine luxury of never having moved apart from one other.
If Emerson is right, and traveling truly is a fool's paradise, then a family Diaspora is just another version of that fool's paradise.
Family squabbles, unless they involve chipped teeth, broken china, fire arms or 911 calls, are blessings in disguise; they are merely the shadow or flip side of living and interacting with our own loving and contentious kin.
Such living is something mankind did for the first two million years of its evolutionary or intelligent design or creationist history.
It was not until the economy of the post WWII era convinced us opportunists that it was best to contact relatives via long distance phone calls or Hallmark greeting cards on Thanksgiving Day, rather than to have them at our table gnawing on our turkey, lathering gravy onto our linen tablecloth and guzzling our cooking sherry.
Osborn's four sisters bristle under the personality synopses their father anointed them with: "Esty's smartest, Arry's wildest, Ida's slowest, Cora's mildest."
While only Ida had cause to demand family therapy, all the sisters resisted their characterizations, but like Euripides' Oedipus the more they resisted their identities, the closer they were driven to them.
Structurally, it is amazing how Osborn matches the later template or formula of Tennessee Williams.
As in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, the entire first act depicts how static and arrested life has become for the four sisters and the people with whom they are intertwined.
Their lives have become Procrustean fits.
Rather than whirling in harmony, the sisters are like intermeshed gears that have seized; the audience experiences a palpable tension and yearns for release in the second act.
Against their best interests, the family capitulates to habit; panders to their security interests and honors their fear of change: the entire cast of characters collectively and covertly works to hold the others in check.
Only the cashiered Professor—David, husband of sister Esty—recognizes the total state of stagnation and psychological arrest the four sisters and their families have slumped into.
While David is too obnoxious, pompous and arrogant to be taken seriously by the sisters, his heavy-handed tyranny does serve as a catalyst for revolt and the necessary stimulus for change.
As the cliché goes, things have to get worse before they can get better and David is just the man for the job: he drives his wife Esty out of their home and lures Carl away from his home with Ida.
In the end, everyone musters the courage to shift gears, albeit in unison, and the family happily survives the minor cataclysms of change.
MORNING'S AT SEVEN is a snuggly written play.
It depicts the warm, cozy, secure, feelings engendered by the closeness of big family life while honestly exploring the tensions and discomfitures inherent to a tightly knit family ensconced within a small community.
Our contemporary society is fed a mixture of sound bites, action thrillers, Red Bull and bumper-to-bumper freeway commutes; as a result, the pacing of MORNING'S AT SEVEN seems frustratingly slow.
Although the tempo is probably characteristic of the time and setting of the play, director Sue Trigg could have squeezed some of the air or dead time out of the show.
Brisker pacing could make the show more stimulating for those of us accustomed to stroboscopic action and such rapid fire fare as BOURNE IDENTITY part XI, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE PART XV and OCEANS 27.
For tickets to this thoroughly enjoyable nostalgia piece of theater Americana, call the Altarena Box Office at 510-523-1553 or visit their web site at www.altarena.org.