Monday, July 07, 2008

"Before Breakfast" - The Hughie Prototype

In Before Breakfast, a short monologue, a young woman Mrs. Rowland, puttering about in a squalid apartment gets breakfast ready for her boozing, artist husband who is waking up from a hungover slumber in the next room


It reminds me a bit of Hallie's opening monologue in Sam Shepard's Buried Child, and Maggie's first act monologue in Tennessee William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The monologue's structure is around the discovery of an affair, but almost in the dead center of the piece we get some purchase on O'Neill's deeper themes of money, marriage and happiness: "There wouldn't be many of them now envy my catch if they knew the truth!"

The young poet husband, from a wealthy family, is a drunk, a layabout and a wastrel. And now, he has gone and got another girl knocked up. The play ends with an offstage suicide.

The Personal Equation - Loneliness and Justice

O'Neill's four act play engages with socialism, anarchy and unions through the dramatization of plot to blow up a ship.

Tom Perkins, Jr. is the son of the 2nd Engineer of the S.S. San Fransisco and he has fallen into the ideology and the aura of Olga Tarnoff, a dark and intense woman who is involved with a group of anarchists plotting to dynamite the engines of a ship.

Tom finds out the ship is none other than his father's! Tom volunteers for the job and goes to visit his lonely old man who lives alone in a small house in Jersey City. The purpose of the visit is for Tom to warn his father, but the scene plays out into a pitiful exchange between a proud old man and his angry son. The lonely father begs the son to not leave him, to take the path of the straight and narrow.

Tom had been an employee on the San Fransisco, but had been dismissed that afternoon. The father begs Tom to reconsider, to go and get his job back with the company.

The dialogue verges on the melodramatic, but there is the deep, pathetic loneliness and the reverberation of shattered American dreams that will echo in the exchanges of Arthur Miller's fathers and sons a few decades later.

Perkins: Listen! If I went to them - I've worked faithfully for thirty years. They've never had a complaint to make of me - if I went
and aksed them-


Tom: (frowning) What?

Perkins: And you were to promise them to five up this I.W. foolishness - you're only a boy, you know - and you promised not to live with that woman any more - I think - I think they might -

Tom: (in hard tones) Take me back?

Perkins: Yes, yes, I'm almost sure. I'll see Mr. Griffin the first thin in the morning and I'll -

Tom: And YOU advise me to do this?

Perkins: (faltering) I think - I think -

Tom: You advise me to cringe like a yellow mongrel and
lick the boot which has kicked me out?


Perkins: (half-insane with nervous fear of everything) I don't know - I
don't - You must go back to your position, really you must - I've dreamed so much - You'll be president of the Company some day - I've failed - you must succeed - Please, Tom, please go back! I know they'll take you if you'll only -



Things end up tragic of course, and O'Neill has a bit of twisted fun with the melodramatic manipulations in the last act. Even the very last line of the play, "Long Live the Revolution," is rendered as a cruel cosmic joke. And outside the windows are the sounds of troops marching off to war.