British playwright Simon Stephens’s three-generation memory play Morning Sun runs through Sunday, December 19, 2021 at New York City Center.
For discerning theatergoers who live and die theater and perhaps still remember the dazzling effectiveness of Stephens’s Tony winning play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (2015) it is a must see.
From the play’s luminous actors, Edie Falco, Blair Brown, and Marin Ireland – referred to in the script as numbers 1, 2, and 3 - the crystalline direction of Lila Neugebauer, along with the brilliance of the set (dots), costume (Kaye Voyce), and lighting (Lap Chi Chi) designers, Morning Sun is brought to perfection by a team of top-of-the-line A-Listers. It is simply thrilling to watch, see, and feel such a well-seasoned team coalescing as they slowly invade our innermost being.
The title of the play stems from the playwright’s love of Edward Hopper’s famed painting Morning Sun, (1952) which features an unknown woman sitting on a bed in a simply furnished room gazing out the window. Is she in a hotel or at home? Is she lost in her thoughts or is she just plain lonely?
Not surprisingly, the tone and temperature of the play, from beginning to end, from the script, to the set, lighting, sound, and the story-telling of all three characters hews closely to the so-called ordinary woman, a kind of Everywoman, as depicted in Hopper’s painting.
As the play opens, we are introduced to the cast, albeit in the dark. Here we hear Voice # 1 Edie Falco (Charlotte McBride, also referred to in the play as Charley) asking “Am I Safe?”
Voice #3 Marin Ireland (Tessa, Charlotte’s whimsical daughter) nervously responds. “I can’t understand your question.”
Voice #2 Blair Brown (Claudette, Charlotte’s stern and no-nonsense mother), follows by instructing Tessa to “hold her carefully, just hold her head up.”
It appears, as we eventfully find out that we are at a hospital and somebody is dying.
During the next intermissionless hour and 40 minutes, starting in the year 1947 when Claudette moves to New York from Nyack, we are taken on a seven-decade journey. The shifting of time and place is frequently presented out of chronological order by all three actors, two effectively changing their voices to portray other characters, both male and female.
The comings and goings of all of the characters - essentially a sequence of reminiscences - are recounted in detail, sometimes in conversation, other times in solo. Though we occasionally find ourselves in other cities, it is the city of New York, where much of the action takes place, that gets the most attention.
Mention is made of Washington Square Park, White Horse Tavern, Murray’s Bagels, Penn Station, Macy’s, Brighton Beach, Cherry Lane Theater, Twin Towers, Natural History Museum, the West Village where Charley grew up in a 5th floor, rent-controlled walkup, and St. Vincent’s Hospital where Charley worked as a receptionist for seventeen years.
Though all of the characters get to have their say in the sun, some loving, some not exactly, it is Edie Falco’s two show-stopping monologues that pulls your heart from your chest. It is Charley, the central character of the play, whose catalogue of experiences - two marriages (one to a museum guard), her uncle Stanley’s funeral, an abortion, a one-night stand with a pilot who fathered her daughter, and her eventual demise -- each happen and signify a different time period, keeping our eyes and ears riveted to the stage.
The magic of this play lies in the everyday ordinariness of each character’s life which frequently tends to echo our own. I might add, upon ending, there was not a dry eye in the house. Nor was there a heart left untouched.
