ARRY IS THE baby in her family of four spry, gray-haired sisters in "Morning's at Seven," and Elizabeth Franz, who's playing her, finds it easy to identify with the family dynamics. Not only did her own mother have three sisters, "I was also the youngest of four," the actress explains on a recent afternoon at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, where the show has been running in previews. "So this brings up a lot of baggage - about the importance of being heard and having an identity."
"Oh, that's wonderful, I didn't realize you were the baby, too!" responds Piper Laurie, who plays Esther, the eldest- even though in real life she was her family's baby. And at 70, the actress is four years youner than Estelle Parsons, the play's Cora, the second daughter in the pecking order.
The four veteran character actresses = "just count the years between us!" exclaims Frances Sternhagen, who is Ida, the next youngest (although the actress is really the next to oldest) - play Midwestern siblings born the Gibbs girls on a farm before the turn of the 20th century.
Now, in 1938, they are living out their days in the kind of eccentric small-town life that goes both nowhere and all over the place in the same day. Esther, Cora and Ida have different last names for a long time; Arry, whose formal name Aaronetta, never married, and, at 60, probably never will.
In John Lee Beatty's lush stage set, the clapboard Victorian houses in which the sisters live mirror each other: same pillars, porches, peaks and flapping screen doors. The Swanson- Cora is married to Theodore - own the house to the left, the Boltons, Ida and Carl, to the right. Arry lives with the Swansons; Homer, the Baltons' aptly named middle-aged son, lives with them. Esther and David Crampton live within walking distance.
"The biggest compliment we've gotten," Parsons says, "is that we all seem like sisters," a familial relationship they've settled into since rehearsals began for the revival of Paul Osborn's play, which when originally produced was set in "the present."
The '39 pemiere of "Mornings'"- with a cast that included Dorothy Gish limped through a short run. But the 1980 revival - with Maureen O'Sullivan, Elizabeth Wilson, Nancy Marchand and Teresa Wright - was a surprise hit that won a couple of Tonys. That it's been dusted off for another revival has a lot to do with the times- "I think people are hungry to see stories about a simpler life," Sternhagen believes, and director Dan Sullivan says the move to mount a production began not long after Sept. 11.
"There's such a lovely spirit in the play," says Franz, whose own touchstones with the play include a childhood in a small Ohio town. When audiences see "Morning's," Parson says, "I think what happens is their own past experiences just flood over them. and they'd love to sink their teeth into something about the way life used to be." "It also helps, Sullivan says, that "there are a lot of good actresses around" to play these meaty roles in the same women-of-a-certain-age genre as recent revivals of "Waiting in the Wings,' set in a home for elderly actresses and "Follies," about a reunion of former chorus girls. But in these casts, the actresses weren't playing sisters, and while Sullivan says he didn't cast the play physically, "we did want them to at least look as if they could be sisters."
As with any show, chemistry is important. "These ladies are very compatible. Which is actually odd," Sullivan admits, "because their natures are very, very different." Gathered in the back of the Lyceum to talk about their sisterhood, the women seem comfortable enough with one another and very polite- perhaps more so than gaggles of siblings.
An example of sisterly rapport: Franz, listening to the others discuss their stage relationships, observes, "Just notice, you're leaving Arry out when you talk. Because you have no relationship with her." Sternahgen: "Well, she is the unmarried one."
To help create the aura, Sullivan talked with the cast about their characters' history: "We figured this is Wisconsin, that they probably moved to the city from a farm and we discussed the network of antagonisms, allegiances and alliancs they've had since childhhod." While the ply isn't autobiographical, there are similarities with Indiana-born playwright Osborn's life: His mother had two sisters whom his father didn't like- a situation similar to that of David Crampton (played by Buck Henry), Esther's husband, who tries to keep from associating with her younger sisters. Altough Esther is the oldest, "she's a more modern woman, belives Laurie, who started her career as a daughter (Ronald Reagan's in the 1950 film "Louisa"), went through a sexy starlet period, then morphed into a serious, respected actress in 1961's "The Hustler." "She's lived somewhere else, since her husband was a professor."
Laurie and Franz played sisters once before, in Neil Simon's 1982 "Brighton Beach Memoirs" - but briefly. "Even though I'd been told the part was written for me, I was fired" before the play opened, says Laurie, relaying the first of several backstage stories from plays that featured sisters. (The actresses also have a slew of cell-phone intrusion stories, but the, what cast doesn't?)
Franz, who played a wife and mother not only in the Simon play but also as her Tony-winning Linda Loman in last year's "Death of a Salesman," remembers her role as one of nine sisters in 1985's "The Octet Bridge Club." "I was the youngest in that play, too," she says, and six of the sisters had been given the same line at different pints during the show's rocky gestation period. On opening night, when the cue came, "all six of us said the line," she recalls laughingly. (A fracas ensued as the cast broke character, the curtain was brought down and a producer stepped forward to apologize that "the women have been under a great deal of stress.")
Back to Morning's: :When we started rehearsing, it was like I wasn't in the rehearsal room but my old backyard," says Parsons, who had an older sister, grew up in a small New England town and remembers her Swedish mother's Minnesota relativs as "these very people: the Swansons." Parsons won an Oscar in 1967 for "Bonnie and Clyde" and has a raft of stage credits, but, in the irony of mass culture, she is probably also best know as a mother: Roseanne's on the ABC series.
Sternhagen, whose two Tonys include one for the aunt in 1995's "The Heiress," also had a run as a well-known mom: Cliff's on NBC's "Cheers." Though hardly a small town, New Rochelle, where the actress raised her six children "is a small community where everyone is very supportive even when they're back-biting. Just like this play." "Poor Ida, " Parsons reflects on her younger stage sister's life. "So much is happening to her, and we just stand there watching." "Well, comforts Sternhagen, "what else can you do?"

WHERE & WHEN "Morning's at Seven" by Paul Osborn opens Sunday at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., Manhattan. For ticket information, call Telecharge at 212-239-6200.