Morning's At Seven

by Paul Osborn

Book Overview

Four aging sisters in 1938. Says the NY Times, "What makes this gently colored, sharply etched family portrait so engaging is its understanding that laughter and tears, as responses to everyday life,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 057361251X
• ISBN13: 9780573612510
• Release Date: January 1967
• Publisher: Samuel French
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Good Play That Should Be Revived

This old fashioned play was the toast of Broadway in the 1930s, when Paul Osborn was one of the most popular US playwrights, and screen legend Dorothy Gish played Aaronetta Gibbs, the lovelorn spinster whose passion makes the play explode. Again it was revived in the 1980s with Gary Merrill, Teresa Wright and Maureen O'Sullivan. The play takes up the lives of four sisters, all in late middle age, and the men in their lives. Cora has been married to Thor (real name Theodore, but the family calls him "Thor") for many years, but little by little she's feeling squeezed out of her own house due to the constant presence of younger sister Aaronetta, whom they call "Arry," who lives with the two of them and asks like she owns the place. Another sister, Ida, has been married to the eccentric Carl. She's the only one who has children--one boy, Homer Bolton, 40 years old and still a mama's boy who's been engaged to the same poor girl, Myrtle, for thirteen years. Myrtle's uncomfortable, for she lives in the same town as Homer's family but he's never invited her to meet any of them. He's not ashamed of her, he's just too involved with his own mother, not in a sexual way of course, but just, he knows that Myrtle will never make him as comfortable as Ida has. The last sister, Esther, is the most beautiful and in some ways the luckiest. She married very well, to a man called David and they live in the nicest section of town in a beautifully appointed home. Her problem is that David looks down on her family and won't allow her to visit with them. To David, the Gibbs sisters are all white trash, low class dopes who will bring down Esther to their level if he lets them. The whole play takes place in the course of one weekend. It's nicely done and very insightful into the darker corners of the human heart, as well as some amusing humor about small town life. The girls quote a poem they remember from youth, their father used to recite: "Esty's smartest,/ Arry's wildest,/ Ida's slowest,/ Cora's mildest." Seems like a rotten thing to repeat about your own daughters but that's why some people just go crazy if they stay in the small towns.