"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.