Bread and Butter by Eugene O’Neill

A beginner’s take on familiar territory

Bread and Butter is the earliest surviving full-length play written by Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote this drama in 1914, when he was 26 years old. Prior to that, he had written a few one-act plays. Bread and Butter was neither published nor staged during O’Neill’s lifetime; its first public performance didn’t occur until 1998. O’Neill himself would have preferred that his earliest plays be forgotten, including Bread and Butter, but they now show up in collections of his complete works.

A young man named John Brown is the son of a wealthy hardware merchant in the provincial community of Bridgetown, Connecticut. Brown Sr. wants to give his son a position in the family business, but John refuses his father’s plans for his future. John wants to be an artist. After a heated family argument, Mr. Brown is talked into letting John study painting in New York, if only to work such fool notions out of his system. John enjoys the bohemian lifestyle of the artists’ studio and shows much promise as a painter. His creativity, however, is frustrated by the pressure put upon him by friends and family: the father who won’t lend financial support unless John picks a different career, the fiancée who doesn’t take John’s art seriously and just wants him to settle down to family life, the mother who only sees moral turpitude in John’s bohemian lifestyle, and the condescending elder brother who not so secretly covets John’s girlfriend. John is also partially responsible for his own artistic failures, since he lets himself be swayed from committing to his art, wallows in self-pity, and turns to alcohol.

Everybody’s gotta start somewhere, but this feature-length debut by O’Neill feels like a very pedestrian effort. The storyline about the artist who craves creative freedom is a premise that you’ve seen a thousand times. In fact, O’Neill covered very much the same ground himself in his one-act play of 1913 entitled “Recklessness.” The characters in Bread and Butter are more clichés than people. Perhaps the frank discussion of alcoholism might have been cutting-edge for 1914, but I doubt it. This drama took over 80 years to make it to the stage, after all, and then only on the strength of O’Neill’s name, so I think it’s safe to say the theatrical community of the era didn’t find this drama fascinating. In hindsight, however, one can see the baby steps of O’Neill’s stellar career, particularly his focus on alcohol and the dysfunctional family. Bread and Butter is not really terrible writing, it’s just rather boringly familiar. It is not the worst play that O’Neill ever wrote. (That would be Welded.) The ending of Bread and Butter, however, is particularly heavy-handed and hackneyed. Only readers with an avid interest in O’Neill’s career should read Bread and Butter, as a curiosity more than anything. No one else need bother with it.
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