Morning's at Seven by Paul Osborn

First published: 1940

First produced: 1939, at the Longacre Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Comedy; realism

Time of work: 1939

Locale: Two backyards in an American town

Principal Characters:

• Theodore “Thor” Swanson, an older man who lives with his wife, Cora, and her sister Aaronetta
• Cora Swanson, an older woman and the wife of Thor
• Aaronetta “Arry” Gibbs, single sister of Cora who lives with Thor and Cora
• Ida Bolton, sister of Cora, Aaronetta, and Esther who lives next door to the Swansons’ house
• Carl Bolton, husband of Ida who is prone to having “spells”
• Homer Bolton, a forty-year-old bachelor and son of Carl and Ida
• Myrtle Brown, a woman engaged to Homer for eight years
• Esther “Esty” Crampton, sister of Cora, Aaronetta, and Ida who lives up the street
• David Crampton, Esther’s husband

The Play

This three-act play is set in a Midwest American town during the 1930’s. The plot centers on the long relationship of four elderly Gibbs sisters and the secrets that remain unspoken in order not to disturb the tranquillity of their family. The younger sisters Cora, Arry, and Ida have lived next door to one another for fifty years. The oldest sister, Esther, who is nearly seventy, lives only one and a half blocks away. However, the sedentary lives of the sisters and their quirky husbands are disrupted when Homer Bolton, son of Ida and Carl, decides to bring home his fiancé of eight years, Myrtle Brown. Homer, who still lives at home, is terrified by sex and commitment. When his mother suggests that Myrtle and Homer share a double bed, he is deeply embarrassed. Homer’s parents and his uncles and aunts are thrilled to finally meet the girl Homer has been dating for twelve years. Myrtle, who is just as naïve as Homer, demonstrates her childlike attitude throughout the play with syrupy comments like, “I’ve just never had so many people so nice to me all at once!”

The backyard setting, with the Bolton and Swanson porches positioned next to each other, functions well in demonstrating how the proximity of the relatives has taken its toll on the psyches of the sisters and the men with whom they share their lives. It is Homer’s return home that initially propels the action of the play. Homer’s father, Carl, who cannot stop thinking about what his life might have been like had he become a dentist, reveals his quiet desperation by leaning his head up against a backyard tree and by wandering for hours through the neighborhood looking for the “fork” in the road he missed years earlier. These “spells” that Carl endures recur throughout the play. Homer reacts to his father’s “spells” by distancing himself from Myrtle Brown and by comforting his mother. Finally, he tells Myrtle that he can no longer marry her because he needs to take care of his mother while his father is away.

Cora finds out that the house that Carl Bolton owns and had promised to Homer and Myrtle when they marry is no longer needed. The availability of the house propels Cora to act on the long-standing resentment she has felt toward her younger sister Arry, who has been living with Cora and Thor for fifty years. Cora persuades Carl to lease Homer’s house to her for twenty years. Cora now feels that she can finally have Thor to herself and that she can put an end to her suspicions that Thor and Arry have been carrying on a long-term relationship in the house that the three of them share.

Esther listens to Cora’s plan to persuade Thor to move out of their house and leave Arry behind, but Esther has problems of her own. Her husband, David, does not think much of her relatives and considers her sisters and their husbands to be “morons.” Furthermore, he forbids Esther to visit her sisters. Esther refuses to listen to David and continues to visit Cora, Arry, and Ida. Consequently, David devises a plan in which he and Esther can live independently of one another but in the same house: “From now on, I will be living on the lower floor; Esther on the second.”

The action of the play picks up when the sisters finally acknowledge the family secret that they have kept for many years. Arry, who discovers Cora wants her out of the house, shares a letter she has written with Esther. The letter reveals that Arry and Thor did indeed have romantic feelings for each other when Arry first came to live with Thor and Cora. Esther gives the letter to Cora to read, but instead of angering Cora the contents of the letter make Cora see the difficulty Arry has had through the years of living in a home that is not her own with a man she cannot have. Meanwhile, Homer learns that Myrtle is going to have a baby, causing him to resume their plans to marry. Cora gives up her wish to lease Carl’s house, and the house is once again given to Homer and Myrtle. Arry packs her belongings and prepares to move out of Thor and Cora’s house. Dressed as if she is going on a long journey and with luggage in hand, she steps down from Thor and Cora’s porch. Arry reminds Ida and Carl that they had earlier promised she could live with them and she walks up the steps of the Boltons’ house, determined to begin her new life.

Dramatic Devices

Morning’s at Seven is a realistic comedy. The play calls for a typical midwestern 1930’s backyard setting with two houses sitting adjacent to each other and with back porch areas that suggest that privacy may be difficult for the occupants of the homes to find. Through his elderly characters’ initial dialogue, Paul Osborn quickly reveals the everyday ups and downs of two neighboring families who not only are blood related but are able to remain civil to one another after being neighbors for more than forty years.

The wit and humor of the play come from the quirky and oddball characters that Osborn created. Each of the four Gibbs sisters seems to play a distinctive role in the dynamics of the family. Late in the play, Cora recites a poem the girls’ Papa used to say to them: “Esty’s smartest/ Arry’s wildest/ Ida’s slowest/ Cora’s mildest.”

In true dramatic fashion, Osborn slowly begins to reveal the secret desires and stilted dreams of the Gibbs sisters and their husbands. The audience knows that all is not well with the family when Carl Bolton begins to lean his head against a backyard tree, signifying his dissatisfaction with his place in life. The tree continues to function symbolically throughout the play as a reminder of the unmoving life force that cannot be uprooted despite the unsettling questions many of the other characters have about their lives.

Critical Context

Paul Osborn’s title Morning’s at Seven was taken from Robert Browning’s poem “Pippa Passes” (1841). The title functions ironically to suggest to readers and audience members alike that, unlike the last line in Pippa’s song, all is not right with this world.

First produced on Broadway in 1939, Morning’s at Seven did not achieve commercial success until its revival in 1980, when it won a Tony Award and seven Drama Desk Awards. Paul Osborn’s other well-known plays include The Vinegar Tree (pr. 1930, pb. 1931), On Borrowed Time (pr., pb. 1938), A Bell for Adano (pr. 1944, pb. 1945), and The World of Suzie Wong (pr. 1958). Osborn also enjoyed a career as a screenwriter and wrote the screenplays that included Madame Curie (1943), Cry Havoc (1943), The Yearling (1946), East of Eden (1955), Sayonara (1957), and South Pacific (1958).

When Morning’s at Seven was finally recognized by audiences as a critical success in 1980, the producers moved the time of the play from 1939 to 1922 in order to create an even greater sentimentality than the original production had when it opened in “the present” in 1939. Filled with oddball characters and representative of other nostalgic plays of the period, such as Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It with You: A Play (pr. 1936, pb. 1937) and Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (pr. 1941, pb. 1942), Osborn’s play refrained from relying too heavily on the oddity of the characters to develop the play’s effectiveness. Instead, Osborn strengthened the play by developing a warm-hearted look at family values and contrasted them with the secrets families keep and the potential those secrets have to destroy even the strongest of families.

Sources for Further Study

Birdwell, Christine. “Paul Osborn and His Gals of Kalamazoo.” Midwestern Miscellany 13, 1985.

Clurman, Harold. Review in The Nation 244 (May 3, 1980): 540.

Gill, Brendan. “The Theatre: The Age of Innocence.” Review in The New Yorker, April 21, 1980, 77.

Kalem, T. E. “Close Relations.” Review in Time, April 21, 1980, 84.

Kroll, Jack. “The Way We Were.” Review in Newsweek, April 21, 1980, 112.

Weales, Gerald. “Unhappy Families: Mixing Laughter and Cliché.” Commonweal 107 (June 6, 1980): 335-336.