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While the Eugene O’Neill Foundation is known for bringing the prolific and influential playwright’s work to life in a new era, the Danville organization’s next production is set to offer an original take — combining two early plays into one and exploring the dynamic between the two protagonists.
“Warnings Before Breakfast” synthesizes the 1913 play “Warnings” and the 1916 play “Before Breakfast” into one production and puts its two main characters into a relationship, exploring what artistic director Eric Fraisher Hayes describes as two people trying but failing to connect with each other and suffering the consequences of that failure.
“Before Breakfast” on its own is a monologue by a woman, Mrs. Rowland, ruminating over her marriage. While her husband never appears in the play, Hayes said he was inspired by the overarching presence of a “man in the other room,” who is never seen in the original play.
“At some point it dawned on me that I could drop the idea that the journey of the character in ‘Warnings’ into the experience of the man in the other room, so the man in the other room is experiencing the script as ‘Warnings’ and the woman in her room is experiencing ‘Before Breakfast,'” Hayes said.
The protagonist of “Warnings”, James Knapp, is suffering a crisis over hearing loss that jeopardizes his job as a wireless signal operator on a steamboat, and struggling with what his worsening condition means for his job and his ability to support his family.
For her part, Mrs. Rowland’s trajectory in “Before Breakfast” is driven by finding a letter to her husband from an unknown woman, and the ensuing anxiety and frustrations over it as she imagines who the woman is and what her relationship with her husband is.
“So while this man’s sort of having all of his mental adventures and fueled by his anxiety, she’s also going through her anxiety,” Hayes said. “They are their own worst enemies, and their anxiety and their fears gnaw at them and they start going into their heads.”
In addition to showcasing the interplay between the protagonists’ anxiety-fueled mental worlds, Hayes said he is seeking to bring to life the story of the two characters’ struggles to connect with one another juxtaposed with their intense desire to do so.
“I’m trying to show two people who want to connect, but they’re afraid to connect and because they don’t connect they succumb to their worst fears,” Hayes said.
As protagonists of O’Neill’s early work both symbolizing themes and dynamics the playwright was exploring during his early career more than a century ago, Hayes said he felt the characters were written with a great deal in common, and that the relationship he’s showcasing in the upcoming production makes sense.
However, he noted that it was on him to establish them as a couple at the start of the updated and adapted performance coming to Danville this weekend.
“I want the audience to connect them as a couple and see them as a couple, and then see them kind of split apart,” Hayes said.
While this is a unique take that strays from strict readings of both original plays, Hayes said his goal was to be true to the playwright’s vision in ways that the young O’Neill himself might not have been able to in his early career.
“I’m of course taking a lot of creative license, but these early plays are public domain and I think it’s nice to give them a fresh look,” Hayes said. “I’d like to think by putting the world inside the man’s head and the woman also going inside her head, hopefully it develops more empathy, because I think originally you could read these plays and not be empathetic to the characters.”
With hindsight being 20/20, Hayes said he was able to see the themes of the plays as cohesive with one another from a perspective that the young O’Neill might not have had insight into.
“One of the ways I’ve come to see these plays is that they’re very early in his career and he writes characters who have problems — I think he’s kind of exploring the idea of what it is to have a problem,” Hayes said. “These characters as written really lack coping skills, but later in his career he’s a lot better at making characters with coping skills.”
This manifests in the two early plays in question in their parallel endings as originally written, which is another aspect of the upcoming production that Hayes has changed from O’Neill’s original writings.
“I’m revisiting the earlier plays but taking the knowledge of those future plays and trying to show those characters with coping skills that they originally didn’t have,” Hayes said.
The staged reading of the unique plot reimagined by Hayes is set to debut for a weekend-long run at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley on Friday (Jan. 12) at 8 p.m., followed by a sold-out performance Saturday evening and a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. More information and tickets are available at eugeneoneill.org.
