If you need a dose of New York nostalgia, Morning Sun, the affecting new drama at Manhattan Theatre Club from prolific English (yes, English!) playwright Simon Stephens is positively brimming with it.
Claudette (Blair Brown) meets her husband at Peter McManus on 19th Street and Seventh Avenue. They raise their daughter, Charley McBride (Edie Falco), née Charlotte, in a rent-controlled $75/month fifth-floor West Village walk-up. They chat with urban planner/activist Jane Jacobs in Washington Square. Charley remembers listening to her father “tell me about the buildings that were closing and the places that were closing and the city that was closing and the docks that were closing” (some things never change, eh?); she later watches the demolition of Penn Station—“a very peculiar thing for a teenage girl to concern herself with,” according to her mother. She eventually gets a job as a receptionist at (the now-shuttered) St. Vincent’s on Seventh Avenue and 12th Street. Outside the tin-ceilinged White Horse Tavern, Charley meets the man who gets her pregnant with Tessa (Marin Ireland). The Circle Line, the New School, Van Leeuwen’s ice cream, Murray’s Bagels, the perfect game that David Wells pitched for the Yankees on May 17, 1998—it was an afternoon game against the Twins, some of us remember it very well—are all name-checked.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Yet while New York looms large, it’s ultimately only a backdrop for this moving multigenerational piece. And an invisible one at that: The bleak, brown-for-days set by dots conjures something almost purgatorial. Morning Sun centers on the McBride women, though Three Tall Women–style they’re listed only as 1 (Falco), 2 (Brown), and 3 (Ireland); to tell all of their life—and death—stories, Brown and Ireland take on a variety of roles, including Charley’s father, her longtime boyfriend Eddie, and her abusive boyfriend of 10 years, aka “shithead Brian.”
It’s a tricky business, replaying your life story—or your mom’s, or your grandma’s. And it takes a good five minutes or so for Morning Sun to find its rhythm. But once it does, it feels like flipping through a terrifically detailed, and colorfully narrated, photo album. Stephens (Bluebird, Heisenberg, the Tony-winning Best Play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is a first-rate storyteller. And Falco, Brown, and Ireland are all, as expected, wonderful—they really do have a family-style connection; Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery), who knows how to handle a delicate familial story, directs. (You might remember Brown from the 2017 Atlantic production of Stephens’ On the Shore of the Wide World, which also focused on three generations; incidentally, that play also took its title from a work of art—a Keats poem—while Morning Sun is drawn from, and in one scene vividly describes, the Hopper painting of the same name.)
Bonus: Morning Sun is only 100 minutes long—which gives you enough time afterward to go down to Peter McManus. Get the Pop Pop’s Top Shelf Cheeseburger with Tater Tots; you’ll thank me later.
Morning Sun opened Nov. 3, 2021, at City Center Stage I and runs through Dec. 19. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
