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Paul Osborn's 1939 play "Morning's at Seven" is a respected example of American stage comedy, a warmly thought-of view of a large family in a small town.

But for Albuquerque theater veteran Brian Hansen, the play is also something of a personal soapbox.

"It's a chance for me to air out my belief that there is no such thing as an uninteresting life," said Hansen, director of an Adobe Theater production of the play that opens today. "Human life, even in small towns, displays these epic forces at work. Homer could have written `Morning's at Seven.' "

Except that instead of the ancient Greek world of Homer, "Morning's at Seven" is set in a little town in America just before World War II.

It's about four sisters - three of them married, one of them not - and their families. The plot revolves around what happens when the 40-year-old son of one of the sisters decides to marry his fiancée of 12 years and brings her home to meet his kinfolk.

This momentous occasion has unsettling consequences. It leads to dissension between one sister and her husband, sends another sister's husband into a bout of introspection and prompts the eviction of the spinster sister from the home of the third married sister.

"It is emotional in the best sense," Hansen said. "You get hooked into these people's lives, and you're laughing at them and crying with them at the same time.

"That's the strength of really great playwrights such as Chekhov. He has you laughing and weeping at the same time."

Hansen, 71, was a professor in the University of New Mexico theater department for more than 17 years and chairman of the department for six of those years.

He took early retirement in 1996 and moved back to his hometown of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1998 to manage some family property there.

Although he never really severed his ties with Albuquerque, he and his wife, Linda Williams, did not settle back into the city until slightly more than a year ago.

"Morning's at Seven" is his first theater project in Albuquerque in about nine years. His wife is portraying the role of the spinster sister.

"It's a wonderful play," Hansen said. "The characters are not just well drawn but are also eccentric. There's this whole collection of eccentricities that defines for me what it is to be human."

In that sense, Hansen doesn't see much difference between Osborn's comedy and the works of Shakespeare.

"Both deal with the question of what it's like to be a human stuck on this planet," he said. "Everybody can relate to someone in (Osborn's) play, has known someone like a character in the play."

Does that go for Hansen, too?

He reluctantly concedes that he sees something of himself and his university colleagues in one of the play's husbands, a college professor who, quite without foundation, considers himself superior to the rest of the family.

"I guess that comes from years of lecturing to people who don't quite get what we're talking about," he said.