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Morning Star begins in 1910 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with a Russian-Jewish family that feels grateful for the freedom of American life. The play stays with the Felderman family for the next two decades as widowed immigrant Becky Felderman, her three daughters and one son experience triumphs and losses triggered by historic events of the time. “Morning Star radiates…with warming laughter and makes its own kind of music with Jewish idiom and intonation,” wrote The
Christian Science Monitor. The New York Times referred to Morning Star as “a kind of sepia-toned annotation of the history of immigrant life after the turn of the century.” According to Backstage, “The play is Odets flavored…but with less politics and a stronger woman’s perspective.” Commented The
New Yorker in 1999, “What feels…real is the sound of the new century: the rumble of the subway, the ragtime rhythms banged out on the piano, the American history lessons given to immigrants cramming for citizenship, their charming malaprops. ‘The sky’s the limitation,’ says…a haberdasher briefly down on his luck…” Said the Sarasota Herald Tribune last
season, “While Becky tries to keep her family together and happy, tragedies strike, causing rifts that can alternately make them stronger or tear them apart.” And added The Tampa Tribune,
“It is a steady, loving portrait of an immigrant family, filled with everyday romances, truths and tragedies.”.
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