Glass Only 3/4 Full for 'Morning's at Seven'

By MARK KENNEDY

May 31, 2002 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — When this year’s Tony nominations were announced, there was the usual joy tempered with sorrow. Over at “Morning’s at Seven,” the feelings were even more intense.

The good news was that the revival snagged nine nominations, including three in the featured actress category. The bad news was that the play has four featured actresses.

You do the math.

“The whole thing is a bit crazy,” says Frances Sternhagen, one of the lucky three. “In a way, having any kind of artistic endeavor be judged the way athletic competition is judged is kind of crazy.”

Sternhagen, 72, and cast mates Elizabeth Franz, 60, and Estelle Parsons, 74, were nominated for best featured actress--a group that now has a collective 13 Tony nominations, three wins, an Emmy and an Academy Award.

Sternhagen got the news from a friend on the Tony nominating committee. A well-connected gym teacher told Parsons before her morning workout. And Franz came home to discover her answering machine blinking madly.

Within minutes, though, all three were more worried about the exclusion of the fourth actress in their production--Piper Laurie, 70, whom they consider as essential as a fourth leg holding up a table.

“We all came to the theater that night and went right to Piper Laurie and said, ‘You should have been nominated,’” says Sternhagen. “She said, ‘I’m just not going there. It’s OK.’”

Besides Sternhagen, Franz and Parsons, the featured actress category is rounded out by Kate Burton of “The Elephant Man” and Katie Finneran from “Noises Off.” The awards will be handed out Sunday in ceremonies on PBS and CBS.

“We all have the same attitude, which is, ‘What? We’re all nominated? This is too strange.’ I don’t think there’s any feeling of competition,” says Sternhagen, who won Tonys for “The Heiress” and “The Good Doctor.”

“Morning’s at Seven” also earned nominations for best revival, costume design, scenic design, direction and featured actor--Stephen Tobolowsky and William Biff McGuire.

“With such seasoned actors, you’d think you’d get into ego problems. There hasn’t been a moment of that,” says Franz, whose credits include “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and a Tony for “Death of a Salesman.”

Parsons endorses that wholeheartedly. “We’ve had no rancor. We’ve had a really heavenly time right from the very beginning,” says the Oscar-winning actress from “Bonnie and Clyde,” who has earned four Tony nominations during her career.

That sense of collegiality is unlike the play itself, of course.

Written by Paul Osborn, “Morning’s at Seven” explores the long-standing sibling rivalries of four aging sisters who live cheek by jowl in a Midwestern town in 1939. Their relationships grow strained when a nearby house becomes available and they begin to jostle over how to live out their remaining years. A long-buried family secret complicates matters even further.

Offstage, the actresses refuse to allow a mere Tony nomination to create such tension. Anyway, Laurie is hardly without her own honors, having earned three Oscar nominations, a Golden Globe for “Twin Peaks” and an Emmy.

“Piper is such an incredibly gracious lady that it couldn’t possibly ever be awkward,” says Parsons. Franz agrees: “In fact, we’re laughing at it a lot,” she says.

Sternhagen, Franz and Parsons have even come up with a solution to end such a theatrical dilemma, and in separate interviews the three actresses propose it as if reciting from the same script: ensemble awards.

“We were hoping we’d get an ensemble award because we knew this kind of thing was bound to happen,” says Parsons.

“Everybody in it should have been nominated in some way, and the best way would have been to have an ensemble category,” says Sternhagen.

Such a category hasn’t been created yet at the Tonys, despite some lobbying by the actresses even before the nominations were announced this year.

“They say it doesn’t make money. They can’t sell it,” says Franz. “And I said, ‘How would you know? Why don’t you try it? Then you can take it off the next year if it doesn’t sell.’

“You don’t act by yourself. You can sing by yourself, you can dance by yourself, play the piano by yourself. But you cannot act by yourself. And if you are, it’s not working.”

Despite the appeals, the nominating committee didn’t go for it. The actresses now face the prospect of negating one another in the featured category and splitting the vote.

That’s OK, they say, and predict that Burton will win.

“I would be very surprised if any of us won, but I would be very happy if one of the others won,” Parsons says, then pauses. “I think I would be--you’ll have to ask me Tony night.”

Win or lose, she adds, just being nominated is an honor.

“We’re just so grateful for the experience, for all of us to be at our ages and be all together and actually have a play to do,” she says.