On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BUNDLES FROM BRITAIN By Stefan Kanfer There are two Eugene O'Neills. One is the blundering, alcoholic, tin-eared O'Neill about whom critic John Mason Brown once observed, "Though he...
...her widowed middle-aged mother, Esme (Dench), a well-known West End actress...
...Jesus," he remarked to a friend, "the incredible, suicidal capacity of men for stupid greed...
...He is a fresh-faced, longhaired young man with ambitions to direct movies...
...This is entry-level stuff for acting students, not an insight for Broadway...
...Together, the ensemble pushes yet another illusion: that Iceman is a great play...
...Before that his biographical drama...
...When a young acolyte, Toby (Maduka Steady) asks her how she achieves her effects, for example, she explains, "You go down to the core...
...the time, 1912...
...Indeed that is exactly what she does in amy's view...
...Dame Judi Dench has already impersonated England's two greatest queens, Victoria in Mrs...
...Long a headliner in Britain, she has become the darling of Hollywood, nonthreatening to the leggy cinema supermodels, and skilled enough to hold her own against anyone in town...
...Brown, andElizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, a role that won her this year's Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress...
...Spacey is very much a '90s con man, sinuous and ice cold, but with an inner smile, as if he were withholding a secret not only from the others but from the audience...
...Inevitably, Dominic begins to stray...
...I was dreamin' Hickey come in de door, crackin' one of dem drummer's jokes, wavin' a big bankroll, and we was all goin' to be drunk for two weeks...
...Esme, with Amy and the others involved from time to time...
...No, but he's breathing hard...
...Dench remains a justly celebrated performer, and she can still find glints in dross...
...At this point she could appear in the most trivial melodrama and still pull in a large following...
...Director Richard Eyre has a light touch and a shrewd sense of timing...
...Blighty is succumbing to the cheapness of popular culture, but the Drama is holding its own against vulgarity and commerce: Dominic vs...
...And small wonder that audiences walk out as intoxicated with the discourse as the drunkards are with their grog...
...The high point in Hare's recent Blue Room was the display of Nicole Kidman's undraped buttocks...
...In a while he recovered his voice, and polished his belief that we all need our illusions to get through life...
...and a house cynic, Larry (Tim Pigott-Smith...
...She considers retirement, encouraged by her new companion, Frank (Ronald Pickup), a well-mannered alcoholic who manages her investments...
...Amy and Dominic are married, look and dress like Serious People, and take enormous pride in his burgeoning career...
...Dominic becomes a film director specializing in violence, and trades in Amy for a blonde bimbo...
...The playwright began work on his schizoid drama in the late '30s, only to abandon it during the first stages of World War II...
...The teetotaling anti-illusionist, Hickey, is a kind of sly Pied Piper who gets caught in his own music...
...Dey give me the heebie-jeebies...
...Matters get worse with the years...
...Lest anyone mistake her significance, Hare makes it clear that the old lady stands for Britain itself—the imperial tradition going senile while we watch...
...I have read and seen this drama many times, and there are always moments when O'Neill reminds me of Robert Benchley's autobiographical note: "It took me 15 years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous...
...Iceman is a euphemism for Death—and a reference to the old Irish joke: "Has the Iceman come yet...
...Robards was a '50s swindler, full of bonhomie and promises...
...By the time the curtain rises on Act II, six years have passed...
...Why not show them with ajump cut...
...Vit mine rifle I shoot damn fool Limey officers py the dozen, but him I miss...
...Throughout, the author attempts an idea play...
...De pity of it...
...The supporting players are no more than props, but they play (sometimes overplay) with brio...
...There it is...
...Before long he is arguing that the critic has more validity than the artist nowadays...
...In the course of one, she articulates her deepest belief: "You have to give love without any conditions at all...
...Why have all those slow transitions...
...In addition, and perhaps most important, Hickey is a spellbinder who creates and carries the momentum, from the moment of his heralded arrival to his doomed exit in the company of cops...
...Then there is the Nobel Prize winner, a visionary praised by his fellow laureate, Sinclair Lewis: O'Neill "has done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly, in 10 or 12 years, from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor and fear and greatness...
...The title, like the text that follows, is at once symbolic and ribald...
...Worse, what they have to say is rarely worth hearing...
...Mocking the self-deluding dreamers of Hope's oasis, he lowers his guard, gets revealed as a wife-killer, and is finally hauled off for execution...
...Surround him with an assortment of the walking wounded, and you have the recipe for The Iceman Cometh...
...The scene is Harry Hope's waterfront saloon...
...amy s view carries on in that tradition...
...No action, just talk...
...I couldn't sleep a wink...
...Meanwhile, Evelyn grows more decrepit by the moment...
...Small wonder that actors love it...
...Or take the General (Ed Dixon), an Afrikaaner recalling the Boer War: "He's still plind drunk, the ploody Limey chentleman...
...he asks...
...This is an old Wildean argument: "Criticism," said Oscar, "demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does...
...This insight was developed into a four act screed, produced immediately after the War...
...and Rocky (Tony Danza), the Italianate bartender who displays the vocabulary and diction of a Dead End Kid: "I hoid crickets choip once on my cousin's place in Joisey...
...Hickey is also meant to be a Bowery Christ, surrounded by the three whores who correspond to the three Marys, and by 12DiscipleswhodrinkwineatHope's supper party—including a betrayer, Parritt (Robert Sean Leonard...
...No better example of the playwright's duality exists than The Iceman Cometh, now in its ne west incarnation at the Brooks Atkinson Theater...
...A great mistake I missed him at the partie of Modder River...
...One hundred years ago the phrase was meant to twit...
...Instead, from the opening scene in 1979 to the closer in 1995, they tend to declaim rather than converse...
...Act One ends with the revelation that Amy is pregnant, news Dominic hears not from his lover but from Esme...
...Bob Crowley's imaginative set combines the dreamlike with the grittily real...
...Alas, for all the hype and advance word about this Harepiece, it is neither deep nor particularly entertaining...
...To Dominic, film and TV is where the action is...
...Be careful: the hangover can last for decades...
...Finally, toss in the O'Neill version of Godot for whom everyone waits but who actually does appear, Hickey (Kevin Spacey...
...That's about the only comment I can find to make, remembering all that has been done from 1918 to date...
...This is a lady for whom the words "control freak" were coined...
...In the beginning, Esme plays a kind of comic relief to her daughter's amorous adventures with Dominic (Tate Donovan...
...It belongs in an expanding category I would call the Yardley play: elegantly advertised, beautifully packaged, and in the end nothing but hard-milled English soap...
...Not for Nightingales), is close to ideal...
...Currently, however, he must content himself with editing a little magazine for cinéastes...
...It is in fact a flawed, overlong work with fabulous parts...
...But Amy clings to her marriage, triggering all sorts of discussions with Mum...
...One is the blundering, alcoholic, tin-eared O'Neill about whom critic John Mason Brown once observed, "Though he possesses the tragic vision, he cannot claim the tragic tongue...
...The young comer is now an influential movie critic with a popular television program, and whenever he and Esme collide he defends the new over the traditional...
...Bob Crowley's set and period costumes are appropriately eerie, as is Paddy Cunneen's mood music...
...Four hours of repetitive, turgid, declamatory, booze-tainted speeches...
...Add the Irishman, Hope (James Hazeldine), who says "bejeesus" almost every time he opens his mouth...
...and Evelyn (Anne Pitoniak), Esme's rapidly aging mother-in-law...
...The cast of 19 are supposed to speak in a naturalistic manner...
...The plot centers around three women, the twentysomething Amy (Samantha Bond...
...The play is composed entirely of talk...
...On the other hand, there are occasions when the personae seem as powerfully realized as any characters in 19th-century Russian fiction...
...Hare's dramaturgy is of a piece with his New Age philosophy...
...If Hickey ain't come, it's time Joe goes to sleep again...
...a dreamer called Jimmy Tomorrow (Paul Giamatti...
...Take, for example, Iceman's sole AfricanAmerican, Joe Mott (Clarke Peters), speculating about the central character: "Never mind de time...
...As the marriage falters, Esme's vocation also takes a nosedive...
...Not a bad idea for debate, actually, but Hare's characters rarely have conversations...
...The comparison is unfair...
...today it is mere twitter...
...The cast in this multilayered and well-made production, imported from England (as was this season'srediscovered Tennessee Williams play...
...The Judas Kiss, traced the last days of Oscar Wilde with barely an inkling of the Master's wit...
...What you do not have, however, is the play's cumulative effect onstage, or the layers of meaning that gather over the time and space of four acts...
...Fold in a trio of heartof-gold hookers (Catherine Kellner, Dina Spybey, Katie Finneran...
...theater, with its creaky unities, is outmoded...
...In the central role Spacey inevitably invites allusions to Jason Robards, who built a career on his sensational debut as Hickey...
...Even when Esme speculates about acting she has nothing original to express...
...The script is the product of David Hare, perhaps the most overrated of the British playwrights invading Broadway today...
...She is nicely abetted by Bond, who goes from late adolescence to mature womanhood with the aid of wigs and some sharp technique, and by Donovan, as the classic trimmer who dispenses a rationale for every wound he gives...
...As Amy heads toward misery and death, and Esme's own fortunes circle the drain because of Frank's incapacity, the actress effortlessly displays a range of emotions from the comic to the stiff upper to the melancholic...
...Howard Davies has directed in a painterly manner, highlighting each character without diminishing Hickey's importance...
...The truth is, if the actors followed ?'Neill's lines as written they would represent caricatures, not real people...
...Esme's influence at home and on the boards continues to decline...
...When Evelyn is offstage, he toys with the notion of England as theater and theater as England...
Vol. 82 • May 1999 • No. 6
