Warnings Before Breakfast

On January 12, 2024, Eric Fraisher Hayes unveiled his most audacious production yet as artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation: Warnings Before Breakfast, an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Warnings (1913) and Before Breakfast (1916). Directors have experimented with O’Neill’s one acts for nearly a century, of course. In 1929, E. J. Ballantine combined In the Zone, Bound East for Cardiff, The Moon of the Caribbees, and The Long Voyage Home into one story, the Glencairn Cycle, an approach that was replicated for the film The Long Voyage Home, directed by John Ford for United Artists (1940). In 2012, Richard Maxwell similarly combined Bound East for Cardiff, The Moon of the Caribbees, and The Long Voyage Home under the title of Early Plays as a collaboration for the Wooster Group and New York City Players. In 2010, Robert Falls introduced another approach by pairing O’Neill’s Hughie with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Goodman Theatre, with Brian Dennehy performing both eponymous characters. This bill revealed compelling resonances between the plays through the juxtaposition of speaking and silence, comradery and isolation, hope and hopelessness, and was subsequently remounted at the Geffen Playhouse in 2018, with Dennehy reprising both roles.Warnings and Before Breakfast represent an unlikely pairing at first blush. Basically a monologue, Before Breakfast represents Mrs. Rowland badgering her husband, Alfred, who remains offstage, about his womanizing and indolence until he reaches his breaking point and kills himself with a razor. O’Neill purportedly envisioned Before Breakfast as a challenge to audiences, wondering, “How much are they going to stand of this sort of thing?” By contrast, Warnings features James Knapp, a ship’s radio operator, trying to negotiate domestic obligations and maritime responsibility aboard the SS Empress because he is losing his hearing. Tragedy being the preferred mode of O’Neill, these conflicts culminate in a shipwreck when Knapp fails to hear the warning about a derelict and commits suicide with a revolver. In the “Director’s Notes,” Hayes describes Warnings Before Breakfast as a “quest to find empathy for the characters [from the two plays] and their circumstances.”On the night I saw Warnings Before Breakfast, Hayes and company did their best Carlo Collodi by breathing life into O’Neill’s otherwise wooden characters. More than that, Warnings Before Breakfast revealed compelling resonances about marriage, poverty, despair, responsibility, and even understanding in O’Neill’s early plays.Warnings Before Breakfast begins with Woman (Emily M. Keyishian) and Man (John Tessmer) seated on opposite ends of the stage, a raised platform in the Museum of Sam Ramon Valley in downtown Danville, sparsely furnished with tables and chairs. As the lights came up, “Springtime of Love” (1918), written by James Scott and performed by Guido Nielsen, brought Woman and Man center stage for a waltz—a fine choice by sound designer Rob Evans as the piano solo filled the hall with touching melody. Keyishian and Tessmer were bashful and loving during the dance, smiling and staring into each other’s eyes. At one moment, Keyishian laughed, perhaps at something Tessmer whispered or just from the pleasure of the dance. This moment of intimacy was a valuable addition by Hayes because it established how much Woman and Man loved each other once—something akin to Edmund’s story about Shaughnessy that, however briefly, brings the Tyrones together in laughter in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. A crashing sound combined with water sloshing that invoked the naval disaster of Warnings interrupted this reverie and propelled Woman and Man to opposite ends of the stage. Both took furtive drinks from flasks and then sat down, with the physical distance between the performers conveying the emotional estrangement of Man and Woman.The rest of Warnings Before Breakfast proceeds in episodic fashion with scenes taken from O’Neill’s plays intersecting and contrasting—with stage right being Woman’s space and representing the world of Before Breakfast and stage left Man’s space and Warnings. A simple change of lights, dimming one side of the stage or the other, delineated one scene from another. During these episodes, Keyishian and Tessmer were joined by three “formless fears” (Adrian Deane, Kyle Goldman, and Cynthia Lagodzinski), which were, as Hayes remarks in the script, “an homage to the stage directions in scene two of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.” Seated on a bench against the upstage wall in the middle of the stage, the fears entered scenes and became different characters to interact with Woman or Man. During the first scene with Woman, for example, Deane became Helen, Alfred’s mistress from Before Breakfast, and spoke aloud a letter Woman finds in Man’s coat as envisioned by Hayes. The first of many appearances by Helen, this was an excellent way of humanizing the female characters in Before Breakfast and Warnings who have been fairly criticized as unflattering representations. During scenes with Man, the fears became members of the Knapp family or sailors aboard the SS Empress as necessary.Directorial decisions and performative choices did much to fulfill Hayes’s ambition of finding empathy for Mrs. Rowland and James Knapp. During scenes from Warnings as Man’s story unfolded, Keyishian often pantomimed sewing in silence, working an imaginary needle in and out of imaginary fabric, making long pulls and occasionally rubbing a finger and grimacing, implying that she had been pricked by the needle. Woman’s sewing during Warnings Before Breakfast transformed Mrs. Rowland’s remark to Alfred—“All we got this morning is bread and butter and coffee; and you wouldn’t even have that if it wasn’t for me sewing my fingers off”—from badgering to acknowledgment of her sweated labor. Echoing Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the gestus (a gesture that codifies socioeconomic dynamics), Woman’s sewing emphasized the drudgery of female work at the turn of the century and resonated with Mrs. Knapp’s complaints in Warnings. Moreover, Hayes’s expansion of Before Breakfast by adding scenes that featured Helen (Deane) talking with her mother (Lagodzinski) about her pregnancy contributed to the humanizing of women. “He said he loved me,” Helen says, “I love him. You should understand. I need to know what to do. I need your help.” Bringing Helen into Warnings Before Breakfast emphasized women’s struggles with love, sex, and marriage and even implied a backstory for Woman, who may have described Alfred in the same words before she discovered that marriage did not live up romantic expectations, as Beth Wynstra contends in Vows, Veils, and Masks.Likewise, Hayes found ways of cultivating empathy for James/Alfred through his representation of Man. During one scene from Warnings after the SS Empress strikes a derelict, the First Officer (Goldman) describes the imminence of the ship’s sinking: “I wouldn’t give it more than half an hour—an hour at most, sir.” Captain Hardwick (Lagodzinski) acknowledges, “She’s listing pretty badly,” and then the actors suddenly began mouthing their lines in silence. Trying to hide his apprehensions that his hearing is finally gone, Man had been keeping his head down and pretending to work the radio but suddenly looked up, eyes wide, as the officers moved their mouths without making any sound. As the silence continued for eight lines of dialogue, Tessmer became increasingly panicked, looking from Lagodzinski to Goldman and back again, so that we could see his dread at the realization that the worst had come. More intriguingly, I realized at this moment that I felt tightness in my chest as I, like Man, yearned for the performers to start talking again, to escape the painful truth of Knapp’s tragedy. With Hayes’s deft direction and Tessmer’s engaging performance, this moment elicited a genuine emotional response from this audience member during a moment that suggested Man’s anagnorisis. When I mentioned this scene during the talk-back, other audience members corroborated how powerful it was.Like Falls’s combining of Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape, Warnings Before Breakfast revealed resonances between Warnings and Before Breakfast and other O’Neill plays. In Hayes’s organization of episodes, a scene in which Mrs. Knapp insists James keep “workin’” despite the danger “or we’d never be able to even the pay the rent” and the family would be “put out in the street” was juxtaposed with Mrs. Rowland’s complaints about the meagerness of their pantry: “It don’t take long to get breakfast these days, thanks to you. All we got this morning is bread and butter and coffee.” Intersections like this emphasize the emotional and psychological stress of living in poverty, a concern in many O’Neill plays. Another striking moment comes when Hayes contrasts Mrs. Rowland’s aggrievement about her lost child, “It’s lucky the poor thing was born dead, after all. What a father you’d have been!” with a scene from Warnings in which Charlie asks James for new clothes, a request that stresses the obligations and failures of fatherhood. The most fascinating resonance comes with Man’s response to Captain Hardwick: “Haven’t heard a thing!” Although this line originates from Knapp’s obfuscations on the SS Empress, it speaks to the failures of Alfred and other men from O’Neill’s plays: they have neither listened to their partners nor understood their obligations—failures that often precipitate tragedy.While Warnings and Before Breakfast conclude with that turn-of-the-century staple from melodramas, suicide whether by revolver or razor, Warnings Before Breakfast forswears this denouement. As tensions rise, Man declares, “It’s my fault!” and “She is lost!” and “I’ve got to do the right thing” (lines from Warnings) and lifts the razor to his neck (the action from Before Breakfast). But the razor does not cut, nor does any revolver fire. Instead, Man crosses the stage to Woman’s space for the first time since the initial dance and asks, “Coffee?” “With a sense of relief and thread of hope,” Woman responds, “Coffee,” as the play concludes. Some might scold Hayes for embracing a banal deus ex machina. The god in the caffeine, perhaps? Nevertheless, I found this ending compelling because it signaled a more complex, more realistic implication to Man’s lines, “It’s my fault!” and “She’s lost!” and “I’ve got to do the right thing.” Doing the right thing in this case involved Man taking responsibility for his marriage, for his wife, for their future, which may still find its way back to the intimacy represented during the opening waltz—but only if Man and Woman do the difficult work of really listening to each other and taking responsibility for their lives together.