REVIEW : Actors Shine in ‘Morning’s at Seven’

“Morning’s at Seven,” about four sisters and their discontented husbands squabbling on adjoining back yards in a small, gossipy town, certainly looks at home in Sierra Madre.

The patrons at the Sierra Madre Playhouse and the community’s graceful old frame houses with their big wide porches seem to have been lifted straight out of this 1939 Paul Osborn play.

Now in its 13th year, the Sierra Madre Playhouse is a community theater with a durable track record of reviving mainstream audience favorites, occasionally featuring Equity actors. Tom Hanks once acted here.

Ironically, although “Morning’s at Seven” debuted in New York just before World War II, it wasn’t until its revival on Broadway in 1980 that this comedy/tragedy--with the emphasis on comedy--made its greatest impression.

The play is a favorite with community theaters, and it’s easy to see why. For one thing, it’s a terrific play about old people, whose lives fester and boil as if they were still adolescents. The play does give you pause to consider that growing old is not a mellow event but a viper’s nest of pain, recrimination and jealousy. At least life doesn’t slow down.

In fact, the dullest characters in this play are the middle-aged “kids,” a ludicrous couple perfectly portrayed by the prudish, pinched-up Ron Kidd and Teri Prince. The latter’s engaged woman has been keeping a hope chest for 12 years--a truly funny or possibly horrible thought. And, hilariously, she’s pregnant.

Osborn knew about life in little, self-contained towns, and he wrote the play as a commemoration to his own strange relatives, disguised here as the four Gibbs sisters and their foundering, fading husbands.

There’s wild and never-married Aaronetta (Verna Chilton), still living with her married sister Cora in an arrangement more weird than it looks. And among the married sisters, there’s the slow Ida next door (Bette Archer), the smart Esther up the hill (Barbara Paige) and the mild Cora (Suzanne Luckie Williams) who wants to take her old husband and flee her wild sister for refuge in a new house across town.

Williams’ unpretentious, reticent performance is the show’s singular achievement among a nine-member cast. Williams’ final simmering explosion as she unloads a life of hatred at her unmarried sister--notice how Williams’ fluttering arms speak more than words--exposes the play as the tragedy it could have been if Osborn hadn’t layered it with comedy. As they say, comedy and tragedy aren’t far apart.

The men in these sisters’ lives are irascible and forlorn: the dullish-affable Fred Ellsberg; the cynical, superior Pat Paige who disdains his in-laws and makes his wife live on a separate floor, and the addled, distracted Terrance Roseen, a Jonathan Winters look-alike who keeps pressing his troubled forehead against the nearest tree. You just know these men will die off before any of the women.

The production’s flaws are a regrettably bland look-alike set of back-yard porches that resemble yellow wooden planks out of “Tobacco Road” and don’t begin to suggest the warmth of the play’s setting. Two spindly chairs for props don’t do it. Budget restrictions or not, the set is a disaster and it’s testament to the actors that they make you, after a point, forget it.

Also, on a visual level, the costume choices for the women--Depression-era housedresses--are notably dreary designs. The lighting is also a monotone. In short, the art design is flat and unimaginative. It’s with technical values, not the acting side, that the Sierra Madre Playhouse needs improvement.

Although her staging and pacing could be trimmed and accelerated, director Kathi Fitzpatrick draws textured portraits from her cast, capturing, on the whole, the deceptive malaise of aging back-yard gossips in a town we all came from, somewhere, sometime.

“Morning’s at Seven,” Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday matinees, 2:30 p.m. Ends May 30. $7-$8. (818) 355-4318. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.