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May 2022

Written by Naomi Forman

About the opera:

Before Breakfast is an opera after the play by Pulitzer Prize Winner and Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill, with music by American composer Thomas Pasatieri. It premiered in 1980 at New York City Opera with Frank Corsaro as director and librettist. O’Neill’s  original play was barely 20 minutes long. The opera has a running time 45 minutes, both because it takes longer to sing a line than to speak a line, but also because Corsaro created a back story for Charlotte; in the opera, young Charlotte spent time as a marathon dancer. The interpolated information adds more playfulness and rounds out her character

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The setting is a sparse two-room tenement apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, 1916. Time of day: before breakfast, of course!  

About the characters in the opera:

The opera has two central characters: Charlotte, a hard-working, middle-aged woman of Irish decent, and her husband Alfred, a once-charming Harvard graduate and poet, now sunk to the level of philandering drunk. In the opera, Alfred is never seen nor heard; their marriage is revealed though one-way conversations, with Charlotte doing all the talking while her inebriated husband listens from the bedroom. Interestedly, in the original play, Alfred was seen (or to be more specific, Alfred’s “sensitive, long-fingered, trembling hand” is seen) as Charlotte passes him a basin for shaving.  At the play’s premiere, it was the O’Neill himself who played the “role” of Alfred, primarily to gauge the audience’s reaction to the production.  It was the last time he ever acted in a play.

Additional characters referenced during the course of the opera include Spike (Charlotte’s marathon dance partner),  Mr. Ostrow (a pawn broker), Charlotte’s mother and father and Alfred’s father and college buddies. These characters are fleeting: except one. 

Charlotte and Alfred’s daughter is referenced again and again throughout the opera.  Like Alfred, she is never seen, but the apartment is littered with dolls and toys. So for this production, we created a role for the daughter, bringing this ethereal character from the page to the stage. The daughter tells us her story in movement and dance. Dramatically, the addition of this young character brings more depth and contrast to the opera and to allow the audience to see Charlotte’s love for her child in contrast with her disdain for her husband. 

About about operas after plays by  Eugene O’Neill:

Although a number of works by O’Neill have been adapted for opera, the playwright steadfastly refused to write the librettos himself. However, he was always pleased to sell the rights and collect the royalties. The first play to be adapted for opera was The Emperor Jones, composed by Louis Gruenberg. O’Neill’s letter to the composer/librettist was most gracious:

“I read [your libretto] last night with the greatest interest and  have no  suggestions to offer.  You have made a damn good job of it…I certainly look  forward to hearing and seeing the production.”  

About marathon dances:

In Before Breakfast, the opera’s protagonist, Charlotte, was a marathon dancer in her younger years. These “dance ‘till you drop” contests could go on for days or weeks with large cash prizes given to the last couple standing. 

Throughout the opera, Charlotte references a fateful dance marathon that is seared into her memory - the dance where she met her husband, Alfred. Alfred was in the audience with his college buddies while Charlotte and her dance partner, Spike, were on the dance floor. Day after day, Alfred came to cheer her on, much to the chagrin of  the oafish and jealous Spike. Details are sparse, but we know that Charlotte spent upwards of “500 hours on the dance floor” at this particular event.  

For Charlotte, five-hundred hours on the dance floor amounts to twenty-one straight days of shuffling her feet with the music. These contests had only two rules: your feet must keep moving & your knees must not touch the floor. In order to take care of “necessities” such as using the toilet, dancers were allowed to leave the floor for 15 minutes every hour. This short pause was also a chance to catch a few winks, and cots were often provided by the presenters. Some of the “better” dance competitions  hired doctors to monitor the physical health of the participants and hired nurses to rub the dancers’ feet during the break, but this was not common. To maximize their sleep time, eating, shaving and even washing could be done on the dance floor provided that their feet kept moving in basic time with the music. 

“Charlotte must have had incredible fortitude and determination to get to 500 hours,” says Forman. “She was the daughter of poor Irish immigrants and the prize money was sorely needed.” 

Hypothetically, if dancers slept ten minutes every hour, they would get four hours of  “sleep” per day. Healthy young people can function for a few days with little sleep, but 21 days?
 

There was a seedy undercurrent to these dance marathons. The hall was crowded with spectators who alternately cheered and jeered the female dancers. In Charlotte’s case, wealthy Alfred Rowland (whom she later marries) was cheering for her, providing her with clean clothes and even a small amount of money. Others weren’t so lucky.  

In the early 1930’s after the American economy imploded, a new breed of marathon dance participants arrived. These down-and-out second-wave dancers were ill prepared, both mentally and physically for the dance competitions. Their bellies were empty and their souls were addled. The “fun” was gone. These dances had now become a spectacle; the poor watching the even-poorer from the sidelines.  Presenters took advantage of the disparity.  To keep things novel for the waining audiences, the presenters made the short breaks even shorter or only gave breaks every two hours, which upped the ante for the spectators.  

Physically and mentally, this new breed of marathon dancers didn’t have the stamina to win. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 8,1928:

My husband says, “I’m waiting to see one of ‘em drop.” I been here three days  now, and haven’t even got my wash out this week,” confessed one audience  member.
 

And from another audience member, “No, not a show to give one pride… A  shameful exhibition, indeed, of warped and limited mentalities drawing frail and  unhealthy bodies to the breaking point,” complained another.

A flash point in the history of dance marathons occurred in the summer of 1928 in Seattle Washington when Gladys Lenz, a young mother desperate for money to reclaim her son from her ex-husband, attempted suicide after loosing the contest to a celebrity dance couple who held the world record for marathon dancing at that time.
 

This unfortunate incident is well documented and it is likely that Before Breakfast librettist Frank Corsaro was familiar with the story, as the first part of Ms. Lenz’s account is almost identical to Charlotte’s experience on the 21st and last day of her competition when her dance partner, Spike went “squirrelly” and hit Charlotte in his sleep-deprived mania. 

The following account is by Paula Becker on HistoryLink.org (2003) with quotations from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1928

Some Seattle contestants went “squirrelly,” marathon-speak for psychosis  induced by lack of sleep. [On day seven] …one contestant, an E. H. Martineau of  Seattle, “…suddenly smacked his partner [Gladys  Lenz] in the jaw … leaped  over the rail of the dance floor and was caught as he dashed into the street”

By [day 15] what had started as a lark had become seamy. Seattleites watched,  addicted to the spectacle. “A hollow-eyes girl … sagged against her tottering  partner and began laughing on an eerie, false note.”  

By [day 21] , it was over. The couple that finished first won $1000 prize money. 

Eleven days after the dance marathon ended, the fifth-place female finisher  attempted suicide by turning on the gas in her room at the Virginian Apartments,  2014 4th Avenue, Seattle. Gladys Lenz had made the papers mid-marathon  when her partner, E. H. Martineau, “…suddenly smacked his partner in the jaw …  leaped over the rail of the dance floor and was caught as he dashed into the  street. He was delirious from lack of sleep … Gladys Lenz was staggered by the  blow.” 

Lenz continued on with another partner [which] won her only $50, not enough to  reclaim her child in Yakima from her ex-husband. “Leaving the marathon a  physical and mental wreck, she wrote to her former husband in Yakima and  asked him to send the boy. She got no reply, she said. Worn down from the  ordeal and despondent over her inability to reclaim her infant son from her  ex-husband in Yakima.  In black despair, Lenz tried to take her own life [by  turning] on the gas. 

Lenz’s suicide attempt, coupled with the distasteful manner in which the  marathon had played out, galvanized Seattle’s City Council. The Council quickly  moved to ban dance marathons within city limits.

By the late 1930’s marathon dances had all but faded with all their dirty secrets laid bare. In addition to the attempted suicide of Gladys Lenz, there were numerous instances of participants dropping dead on the dance floor (always men) and contests were known to be rigged. Major cities banned the practice and elsewhere, the paying spectators stopped coming.  With the advent of WWII, they were gone for good. 

About Forman Productions: 

Naomi Forman is the artistic director, producer and chief bottle washer of her namesake production company based in Brandon, Manitoba. The company has been making opera approachable and entertaining since its 2010 debut at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival with StarBach’s: The Coffee Cantata.  FP productions have been featured at Ottawa Chamberfest, The Saskatoon Proms, The Professor Bach Project and the Brandon Chamber Players. 

“Don’t put this show on hold,” said the CBC about FP’s production of Menotti’s Telephone Opera. “…it’s sure to be a hit even with the non-opera crowd.”  FP is proud to work with professional artists associated with Canadian Actor’s Equity Association.