Sylvia Regan’s Morning Star falls somewhere between Clifford Odets’s gritty, naturalistic portrayal of the immigrant experience in Awake and Sing! and Arthur Miller’s depiction of the death of the American dream for the children born here. Like Odets and Miller, Regan dramatizes the struggle to assimilate by the Jewish families who landed at Ellis Island shortly after the turn of the 20th century, carrying unrealistic hopes for a golden future packed beside the samovars in their baggage.

With Yiddish-theater star Molly Picon in the cast, Morning Star opened on Broadway in 1940 but managed only a brief run. Although the play has been revived in many stock and amateur productions overseas and is currently being transformed into an opera by Ricky Ian Gordon and William Hoffman, Regan and her dramas have been largely ignored by American theater history.

Morning Star chronicles a 20-year period in the lives of widow Becky Felderman, her three daughters, and 13-year old son Hymie, act one’s bar mitzvah boy. They live in a flat on New York’s Lower East Side, where they have taken in a boarder to help pay the rent. He has proposed to Becky but has been refused. The play begins in 1910, a year before the fire at the Triangle Shirt Factory, where the daughters work. Act two starts off in 1917 and 1918, just as Hymie enlists in World War I. The final scene is set in 1931, to pound home the theme that making it in America comes with unimagined trade-offs.

If Morning Star had a score and lyrics, it might be considered an ancestor to Ragtime, the musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, which spans a similar time frame (albeit covering a wider sweep of the population), or of the lesser-known 1986 musical Rags. Becky’s family are horribly affected by historic events, yet she never wavers in her patriotic love for her new country, even as some of the other characters turn cynical in the face of promises unfulfilled. One character personifies the left-wing politics of the era: Benjamin Brownstein spouts lines right out of Karl Marx, whose writings he carries in his pocket.

Regan creates sympathetic people who engage your affections and your concern, though the structure of the play suggests that the message drives the medium. And despite the uneven skill level of the Theatre Cooperative production, the play delivers a touching portrait of the familiar Lower East Side milieu. We’ve seen folks like these before, but it’s a pleasant surprise to make the play’s acquaintance some 60 years after its Broadway debut.

In general, the men of the ensemble fare better than the women do, the exception being a believable performance by Maureen Adduci, who as Becky underplays the pathos of a mother trying to protect her children in an alien land. She understands that Becky must be a survivor, a member of the sisterhood of woman that includes Brecht’s Mother Courage. As Aaron, Becky’s perennial suitor, Fred Robbins is a charmer, finding the humor in the man as well as his capacity for patience. But the work of both performers is sabotaged, along with Jonathan Levine’s energized performance as Brownstein, by the director’s notion to play the immigrants with Yiddish accents. This decision is fraught with peril because of the distasteful stereotypes that have wafted from the ethnic acts of vaudeville down to their progeny on stage and television.

The other actors need a firmer hand than director Suzanne Bixby’s to rein in bad habits like mugging and meaningless gestures. But the production boasts a set that feels true to a New York apartment of nearly 100 years ago, and it’s lit with attention to mood by Tom Callahan. The Theatre Cooperative is to be congratulated for bringing this play to our attention and for having the courage to attempt a large-cast drama on a small-theater budget.