Their town Four sisters take center stage in Seven BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Morning’s at Seven By Paul Osborn. Directed by Ed Shea. With Tom Roberts, Lynne Collinson, Isabel O’Donnell, Trisha McManus, Anthony Pesare, Wayne Kneeland, Laura Sorensen, Joan Batting, and Bob Colonna. At 2nd Story Theatre through July 17.

The four feisty Gibbs sisters in Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven do have something in common with the innocent Emily Gibbs of the 1938 classic Our Town, by Thornton Wilder — they are intended to represent the American ideals of spunk and resolve.

That said, these Gibbses would eat Emily’s lunch. As the 2nd Story Theatre production is showing us, being a nice person doesn’t have to mean that you let anybody take advantage of you, whether neighbor, fiancé, or flesh and blood.

The word "nice" comes up a lot in this play, written in 1930 and set contemporaneously in a regionally unspecified small town. At first everyone and everything seems quite pleasant, pulling together at an anxious moment. In a comfortable American tradition, Homer Bolton (Wayne Kneeland) is the original homeboy, 40 years old and still living with his parents. Well, he is bringing home Myrtle Brown (Laura Sorenson) to meet his folks for the first time. That wouldn’t be especially special if he hadn’t been traveling to a nearby town for 12 years for their dates, returning home each night to sleep in his own bed.

His family is an odd lot. We meet his father Carl (Anthony Pesare) off stage, told that he’s in the kitchen leaning his head against the wall. He’s prone to "spells," you see. Presently he’s undergoing his dentist spell, lamenting that he didn’t choose that prestigious line of work. Everyone is terrified that he’s going to slide down to his personal nadir, where he obsesses about "the fork," where he first went wrong. His wife, Ida (Trisha McManus), is the usual forbearing saint, though probably a lot more frantic than the church sort.

Her sister Cora (Lynne Collinson) lives across a shared yard with weak-willed husband Theodore (Tom Roberts), ironically called Thor. With them for going on half a century has been her spinster sister Aaronetta (Isabel O’Donnell), known as Aarie, who has "never met a man worth the powder to blow him up." Everyone assumes that Aarie and Thor have been "carrying on" under Cora’s nose all these years, and that may be the secret that we soon learn they share. Cora is dying to have her husband all to herself, and that may very well happen — Carl has declared that if his son Homer doesn’t set a definite date for marrying Myrtle, he will lease the house he built for them long ago to Cora.

The fourth sister is Esther (Joan Batting), who lives only a block and a half away but hardly ever visits. Her arrogant husband David (Bob Colonna), a former professor, is not above making amiably clear to her family that he thinks they are all morons. He has forbidden his wife to talk to them, threatening to exile her to the second floor of their house if she disobeys. (Don’t worry — by the end he and the overly reflective Carl bond, as David adopts him as an acolyte.)

All these flurries of activity and concerns come at us like summer squalls lined up toward the horizon, each ready to burst before we can catch our breath. This breakneck farce pace is at times as exhausting for us as it must be for the actors, who must register reactions in a finger-snap when they need a second or two. Hopefully, further into the run a little more air will leaven the proceedings — we’d get out two minutes later but have connected better with this madcap circus.

Yet this production, under the direction of Ed Shea, is studded with memorably funny moments and even some knee-slappers. When Carl is whining over not being a dentist and his wife screams in apoplectic rage, "You’re just as good as anybody else, Carl!," an easily overlooked comic moment is wonderfully ours. When Aarie appears with a suitcase, threatening to leave in a pout, she is wearing a wide-brim hat and big dark glasses, reminding us of Greta "I vant to be alone" Garbo.

Morning’s at Seven did get nine Tony nominations for its 2002 Broadway revival, but playwright Osborn got wider notice for his screen adaptations of novels such as East of Eden and The Yearling, and of the musical South Pacific. While this play wasn’t quite as daring as his 1930 The Vinegar Tree, which was not unsympathetic to "free love," it does keep its feet on the solid ground of human motivation that we can all recognize. In turn, the 2nd Story troupe does a good job making these characters people we can care about.