On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage O'NEILLS FROZEN SOULS BY LEO SAUVAGE The 1985-86 Broadwayseasonhas started in a promising way at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater—paradoxically, with an impressive revival of Eugene O'Neill's...
...Then, in an intense fourth-act monologue that is still Jason Robards' greatest performance on stage, Hickey tells his own story, unmasks his own lie...
...Pat McGloin (Pat McNamara), another derelict, is a former police lieutenant...
...But it did not appeal to New York audiences when it was originally produced in 1946, shortly after the world had become aware of the infinitely greater tragedies suffered by the victims of Adolf Hitler...
...his colleague (Harris Laskawy) is willing to marry the third...
...He spends most of the evening's four and a half hours sitting at a table with his head between his arms...
...And the deep pessimism this conveys is not surprising from a playwright who once wrote that "the one reform worth cheering for is the Second Flood...
...Whether these portraits were shaped by recollections of the past—and The Iceman Cometh is generally regarded as autobiographical— or by the playwright's dark vision of humanity, they are theatrically real...
...Hope has spent 20 years drinking alongside his tenants...
...In 1967 a three-and-a-half-hour French version was performed in Ihe northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers before a fascinated working-class audience...
...but not today...
...This monument to the victims of alcohol is today thought to be one of the two or three finest among the many important, yet often erratic, works written by the tormented American genius...
...Granted, they are 12 in number, but Hickey is no Jesus and the wretched inhabitants of O'Neill's lower depths have no Savior except death...
...The first bartender (John Pankow) pimps for two of the women...
...Now, nearly 30 years after that second production, the same Jose Quintero again gives us an impressively directed, stunningly performed rendition of the play with the same Jason Robards again in the lead...
...Since his host's full name is Harry Hope—in almost none of O'Neill's plays is an occasion to add trite and unnecessary details passed over—the Iceman is in effect the Reaper who cuts down hopes...
...Finally, he admits that deep inside he hates his mother...
...Now his dream is to stop drinking and defend someone in court...
...There are just a few boring interludes, and as Kenneth Tynan noted apropos of the London opening, in 1958, they are " t he price we pay for size and splendor, and we pay il gladly...
...Protesting that he loves her and did not know she was on the list of those to be arrested, Parritt initially asserts that a change of heart— his discovery of anarchism's wickedness andof his patriotic duty—inspired his act...
...At the time Gabriel Marcel—philosopher, playwright, drama critic, and a leading representative of Christian existentialism—observed that further cuts were in order...
...Fast-talking, obviously successful Hickman, a traveling salesman, periodically descends upon a New York waterfront flophouse and saloon called Harry's...
...The Iceman Cometh is a very complex, very long play—four and a half hours...
...It drags out the rather obscure and frequently not terribly original stories of the characters...
...Whatever O'Neill's intention, Kalmar simply seems to be out of his mind...
...Admittedly, we learn a little more from the context, and much more from the actors...
...O'Neill also gives us two former military officers with problems dating back to the turn-of-the-century Boer War: an English "captain" (Bill Moor) and a rebel "general" (Frederick Neumann...
...Certain commentators, fascinated by what may be a mere expression of the author's black humor, have even insisted on finding a Judas among Harry's regulars...
...It is invariably hard to summarize O'Neill's intentions without seeming to ridicule him...
...Hickey's confession is almost preposterous, almost laughable, yet Jason Robards keeps the theater spellbound...
...Larry alone resists Hickey, for the Iceman can neither bring him anything nor deprive him of anything he is not prepared to lose...
...Indeed, it is something of a mystery how he manages to keep the place going, let alone pay the salaries of two bartenders: Besides the free-spending Hickey, the only outside customers during the entire evening are three prostitutes (Caroline Aaron, Kristine Nielsen and Natalie Nogulich), who consider themselves tarts but don't like to be called whores...
...Greene superbly captures his character's tortured personality in c\c-ry facial expression and every movement of his body...
...One character, Hugo Kalmar (Leonardo Cimino), was completely neglected by the playwright...
...Oban tells us that on the way to take his bar exam he saw a different kind of bar and could not pass it by...
...they await his appearances as others wait for Godot...
...She was faithful, and he was unfaithful...
...At the Lunt-Fontanne, it is...
...Perhaps the 1946 production failed for want of such a powerful actor...
...Sure, he buys the drinks, but he also tells these sorry men stories, helps them to feel a little less alone with themselves...
...Quintero succeeds in helping Eugene O'Neill transfer to them, and thus to the audience, the separate, converging aspects of his personal tragedy...
...Kalmar is a foreign revolutionary and claims to have been in jail for 10 years in his native country...
...Alas, by the end of act four he realizes that he has no lomot-row...
...Allen Swift beautifully portrays Ed Mosher, Hope's brother-in-law...
...For the derelicts who sit and drink and sleep there, "Hickey" represents a happy interruption of their slow and inevitable decay...
...He suddenly impels each of them to turn away from their liquor and illusions and face the truth...
...His character, Theodore Hickman— O'Neill's "Iceman"—is amodern flesh-and-blood incarnation of the Reaper, the skeletal figure holding a scythe to harvest human lives immortalized, if that word may be used here, in Albrecht Diirer's engravings centuries ago...
...In aperhaps excessively strict faithfulness toO'Neill's frequently contradictory or misleading stage instructions, for instance, Quintero has emphasized the "Last Supper" aspect of the dinner Hickey gives to the derelicts...
...Having pushed Harry and his customers to reveal the pipe dreams that had formerly sugared the pain of existence, Hickey watches the men fall back into a drunken stupor, utterly beaten, more helpless and hopeless than ever...
...He sits, drinks and sleeps as the equal of his white counterparts, and he explodes against the humiliating position of blacks in America—rather a novelty for the Broadway of 1946...
...Nonetheless, each one interests us...
...So he shot his spouse to liberate her from a too forgiving heart...
...Still, with the help of Thomas R. Skelton's lighting, he makes the whole of this so-called marathon play accessible to us...
...On the other hand, the miracle of O'Neill's approach to theater was precisely his ability to make a scene ring true—notwithstanding the words—provided that the cast were good...
...Hickey, it turns out, has killed his wife...
...Barnard Hughes tackles the role of Harry Hope, the owner of the waterfront dive with cheap rooms for rent...
...pride of place goes to Jason Ro-bards, and to the at least equally fine Donald Moffat as Larry Slade, the role that seems to have most engaged Eugene O'Neill's interest...
...Joe Mott (Roger Robinson), a black gambler, gives the play an antiracist tone...
...Then he confesses that he sold out in order to get money to spend on a woman...
...Then there is Willie Oban (John Christopher Jones), a graduate of Harvard Law School and, like Eugene O'Neill, a victim of a love-hate relationship with his father...
...Although the uncut version at the Lunt-Fontanne may not be O'Neill's masterpiece either, it remains a drama of "genuine grandeur...
...For contrary to appearances this glad hand is not happy and has no reason to be...
...The greatest weakness is the failure of the dialogue to explain anyone's behavior...
...This, he continued, was proof that while the play had "a quite genuine grandeur," it was not O'Neill's masterpiece...
...Perhaps O'Neill conceived him, mistakenly, as a source of comic relief...
...Some, though, see Thelceman Cometh as a Christian allegory...
...Here, the message appears to be that mankind needs fantasies and alcohol to survive the miseries of our dreadful world...
...Thai is not lo suggest The Iceman Cometh could not be shorter...
...Quintero not only chooses to linger over every minute of the work's slow rhythm, he actually adds a few...
...On the particular visit we witness, set in 1912, Hickey unsettles his appreciative listeners...
...The twelfth derelict, James Cameron (James Greene), is known to all as "Jimmy Tomorrow...
...On occasion he is allowed to break the pose and stumble through pseudophilosophical nonsense, or to shout that someone should be shot...
...A director of Jose Quintero's ability is vital, too...
...This former anarchist, believing solely in death, despises fellow-renegade Don Parritt (Paul McCrane), for betraying a group of ex-comrades, including his mother, to the police...
...In fact, it failed to achieve the status of a major theatrical event until Jose Quintero staged it a decade later, with Jason Robards in the lead, in an abandoned Greenwich Village watering hole that became the first home of the Circle in the Square troupe...
...On Stage O'NEILLS FROZEN SOULS BY LEO SAUVAGE The 1985-86 Broadwayseasonhas started in a promising way at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater—paradoxically, with an impressive revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which questions the value of life...
...She loved him, and he loved her...
...She always forgave him, however...
...That made it impossible for him to feel guilty about his actions and forced upon him a greater guilt: the knowledge that he was unworthy of a woman who couldn' t stop adoring him...
Vol. 68 • September 1985 • No. 12
