Eugene O'Neill Meetup: Drama, Self-Understanding, and Fun

Behold Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play! Written in 1914, while O’Neill was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis, Bread and Butter is a play often dismissed as an early “nice try, but what a misfire” play. O’Neill himself tore it up soon after he wrote it, but only after he submitted it for publication, and it was copyrighted (maybe O’Neill didn’t really want the play to be destroyed?). The play was not produced until 1998.

Bread and Butter concerns the life of young John Brown from Bridgetown Connecticut, whose stolid father put him through Princeton with the idea that he would become a lawyer. Three of John’s siblings, Edward the alderman, Harry the happy go lucky hedonist, and Mary the prude, resent John’s education and his father’s “coddling” of him. Only Bessie, the good soul, is happy for John. The town’s sexy, spoiled, coquette, Maud “Don’t Spill That Junk on My New Dress” Steele, is in love with John. Edward resents John because he couldn’t woo Maud for whom he was panting, but John won her over without even trying.

When John announces his interest in pursuing an artist’s life, his father goes ballistic. Edward looks on John with intense disdain, as does Mary. Harry and Bess are supportive and Maud is on board, for now. Mr. Brown is persuaded by his friend and Maud’s father, Richard Steele, to support John’s ambitions, with the idea that John the talented painter could make lots of $$$$ in advertising. So, John packs up his paints, brushes, and easel, and heads to New York to study art under the tutelage of the beneficent and respected Eugene Grammont. Advertising is not on John's mind.

John’s plans don’t turn out quite the way he’d planned. He’s unable to sell any of his paintings and after 18 months in a spartan art studio with his bohemian buddies, is starting to get discouraged. Grammont, speaking with two of John's roomies, acknowledges John’s supreme talent and agrees to come back to try and persuade John's father to continue supporting John in his artistic endeavors. Brown arrives and is horrified by the studio and John’s nude paintings: “Impressionism! Rot!” Maud had previously seen the nudes and was similarly mortified, although her discomfort was likely due to the fact that John was in the same room with naked women, rather than the "obscenity factor." Brown insists that John return with him to Bridgetown to work in Mr. Steele’s dry goods store. Brown is further incensed when one of John’s roommates, Ted Nelson, shows up three sheets to the wind with Helene, a drunk but highly nubile coat-and-suit model, on his arm. Ted was celebrating his sale of a lurid detective story to a low rent publishing house. John is mortified and pleads with another roommate, Steve Harrington, to get the inebriated couple out of the house. Steve obliges, and then asks John to come with him, as Grammont has arrived to attempt to persuade Brown to let John paint. Brown, of course, is unmoved, and he leaves after cutting off John’s allowance.

A few months later, John and his buddies are lazing around the studio on a Sunday afternoon, hungover and tired. John has been forced to take a job checking sugar bags and barrels with the roughnecks on the docks. He has had no luck at all in selling any of his paintings and has taken to drink. He is miserable. Bessie, who is now married to another of John’s roommates, jolly ol’ Babe Carter, encourages John to keep calm and carry on. Soon thereafter, John’s mother and Maud arrive, begging John to come home, but John is adamant about staying. Edward arrives and insults John. John punches Edward. After his visitors leave, John flops on the couch in despair. Maud returns and uses her feminine wiles to convince John to come home and be a dry goods monger. John finally relents.

The last act finds John and Maud married and miserable. John is a failure at the store and spends all his time drinking and clubbing. John is so disheartened that painting is out of the question. Edward had tried to convince Maud to divorce John and marry him, but Maud will not grant John a divorce, as her goal is to make John as miserable as he’s made her. Ah, love! John and Maud explode into the mother of all marital arguments; they go at each other like two alley cats fighting over the last scrap of wonton discarded by a Chinese restaurant. Bessie stops by to try and cool off John. She tries to convince John to join her and Babe in Paris, where Babe has a landed a promising position. John sadly proclaims how miserable Maud is making him and laments that fact that he is stuck. After Bessie leaves, Maud, who had been listening, doubles down on her fury and really tears into John. An incident with a revolver solves the problem.

Fun stuff, huh? The critics panned Bread and Butter when it premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in September 1998. Wilborn Hampton of The New York Times wrote that the play is “stilted and quaint [which] tries hard to be clever but ends mostly in calling attention to its own cleverness,” He further asserted that the sparse production “translates to the audience’s watching an undergraduate rehearsal of an unfinished play.” Ouch!