O'Neill's lonely talk on an empty stomach

JOHN YI/YH Is that someone upstairs? Nope. Deanna McBeath, CC '00, is very, very alone.

The world of Eugene O'Neill is never pretty. O'Neill's Before Breakfast, a one-character show directed by Judeth Oden, DC '00 and acted by Deanna McBeath, CC '00, is a haunting and striking examination of the dismal existence of wife and husband. McBeath plays Mrs. Rowland, a despondent wife whose spirit is struggling against the afflictions of poverty and chained by the bonds of an unloving marriage. Her silent, artist husband, Alfred, is unable and seemingly unwilling to face the practical necessity of making a living in the real world. Fed up with the unending struggle for existence and the specter of her frigid marriage, Mrs. Rowland grieves and criticizes; there is nothing remotely pleasant left in her hopeless perspective on life. As detail after detail of the pitiful deterioration of Mrs. Rowland's life is revealed, a picture of gradual and tragic degeneration emerges.

That picture is framed by the show's kitchen set—dingy, uninviting, and hauntingly familiar. Each minute detail, from a broken broom handle to the cracks in the sickly green walls, the faded yellow photographs and the heavily laden clothesline reveal the stifling world of Mrs. Rowland's life. She wears a brown ankle-length skirt and a ruffled blouse, the traditional costume of a wife in this period—and yet the feeling in the bleak kitchen is ironically abnormal.

The play begins with thick and weighty silence, shattered only by quick curses and tinkering dishes. If these oppressive silences sometimes drag, it is purposefully so, mirroring the desolation of this woman's barren life. It is an act of courage on both McBeath's and Oden's parts to allow the audience to stew in the stark texture of the work. McBeath has a genius for demonstrative facial expression, and the emotional exploration and torture in her face fills the silence with a self-examination as engaging as monologue.

Oden and McBeath have done a masterful job at capturing the contradictory essence of Mrs. Rowland's desolate character—downtrodden, desperate, not particularly likeable, and yet with the core of a survivor gleaming out of the harsh surfaces of her life. She invokes our pity, and sometimes our disgust; but when she sets her jaw we see that she ultimately continues to grit her teeth and refuse to succumb to the trials of unhappiness and poverty.

McBeath has a doubly difficult role to play: she must portray what are essentially two characters, both the tortured Mrs. Rowland and her husband (although Larry Guth, DC '00, makes a fine cameo as an arm and a series of grunts). She does an effective job at painting pictures of both of them: her Mrs. Rowland is desolate, her Alfred unresponsive and unfaithful. His is the unromantic reality of the artist unconnected to the real world and unable to deal with his own survival, and McBeath's mournful and sarcastic tones fill in his silences. She makes both lives equally as present on the stage, and the tragedy is of two instead of one.

Without the variety of multiple characters, it's a serious challenge to both actor and director to maintain the intensity and interest of a story. Mrs. Rowland's incessant berating does sag at some points, where new inflections or attitudes might have been introduced into the monologue. Still, the two have done a magnificent job of searching the text for moments of new and biting interest. Fleeting but distinct images of babies and doctors, adulterous affairs, and sparkling remnants of the happy past haunt the lines. McBeath's overall presentation is excellent and deeply moving.

Director Oden has described this work as "partially a reaction to the free love policies of the Pro-vincetown set [where O'Neill had spent the previous summer], partially an autobiographical account of O'Neill's first marriage, and partly a realistic attempt to capture the condition of life for a class of people in Greenwich village at the time [1916]."

The disturbing specters of both period and contemporary issues appear clearly in Before Breakfast. Through O'Neill's words, Oden and McBeath examine these matters with power and eloquence. It is a hauntingly familiar and dark vision, but not entirely devoid of hope. This production does justice to the complexity of desolate lives, both real and implied.

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