Before Breakfast

Autumn 1917, New York City: weekday, 8:30 A.M. "Before Breakfast" is set in a flat on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. From the small apartment’s common room, Mrs. Rowland directs all of her comments into a big mirror in the bedroom, where her husband, Alfred, is still sleeping. We see him throughout; we see only Mrs. Rowland’s image in the mirror, near the door, as she comes and goes. She is preparing breakfast and getting ready to leave for her sewing job. Both Mrs. Rowland and Alfred Rowland are old beyond their years. This unhappy woman spends the entire script berating her sensitive poet of a husband—educated at Harvard—whose only success seems to be wooing other women. She reveals that pregnancy forced their marriage, and she bemoans the extent to which they have fallen from their former selves. Mrs. Rowland goes on to condemn her husband’s drinking, his inability to get a job, even the apartment in which they live. She also reveals she has found a letter from Alfred’s lover, Helen, and that she will never give him a divorce. Gradually, he awakens. Soon Alfred’s hand reaches out of the bedroom door to accept some shaving water from his wife. Later, we hear a groan of pain and the noise of a chair being overturned, as we see Alfred cut his throat and crash to the bedroom floor. When Mrs. Rowland calls out to investigate from the common room, she receives no response. She then discovers her husband on the floor of the bedroom, dead from suicide. Shrieking wildly, Mrs. Rowland runs out the front entrance of the flat and slams the door behind her—but not before retrieving her purse.