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The Iceman Cometh
"The Iceman Cometh" was revived in London and brought
to Broadway last season, with Kevin Spacey as Hickey. "Iceman" may seem to
run a lifetime, but then it does encompass life and death In Harry Hope's
bar earlier this century, the seedy inhabitants have only their illusions,
or "pipe dreams," to keep them alive. With the help of liquor and
companionship, each recalls a meaningful past and resolves upon action
-- but in the future. In the present, however, they wait. As the play
opens, they await the arrival of salesman Hickey offering stale jokes
(including the one about the wife and the iceman) and free drinks.
Interviewed before the play's initial opening in
1946, O'Neill described the first act as a "hilarious comedy....a big kind
of comedy that doesn't stay funny very long...the comedy breaks up and the
tragedy comes on." He attempted to explain his approach to Theater Guild
producer Laurence Langner: "There are moments in it that suddenly strip
the soul . . . stark naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority, but with
an understanding compassion which sees him as a victim of the ironies of
life and of himself. These moments are for me the depth of tragedy, with
nothing more that can possibly be said."
Hickey's visit is less and more than the denizens of
the saloon expected. This time he is selling them salvation by destroying
their illusions as he has destroyed his own about his wife. Hickey has
killed his wife, he reveals, to destroy her pipe dream that he was a good
man, worthy of her forgiveness. His pipe dream is that he loved his wife,
until he confesses that as he killed her he told her, "You know what you
can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch." Immediately, Hickey
retracts this slip: "I couldn't have said that. I loved Evelyn." He
departs with the police, still holding onto the pipe dream of loving his
wife.
Goaded by Hickey, the men and women in the bar
accept their hopelessness, and are plunged into the despair they have kept
at bay -- the liquor has no "kick" and the bar seems "a morgue." Each
goes forth to face reality -- with disastrous results -- and each returns
to the sanctuary of the saloon to offer a "face-saving version of his
experience when he went out to confront his pipe dreams." With the help of
liquor, they recover their illusions . All but Larry in a memorable
performance by Tim Piggott-Smith. Larry, who knows that "the lie of a pipe
dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten lot of us," has clung to
the illusion that he is uninvolved, detached. But by the end, he has sent
Don Parritt to his death. Facing the truth about himself, a truth that
means death, Larry acknowledges that he is "the only convert to death
Hickey made here."
In a remarkably skillful performance, Kevin Spacey intelligently
built the character of salesman Hickey from the anticipated joviality
to the evangelical sales pitch for the biggest sale of his life:
selling the group on reality. Their conversion spells destruction
for the fragile inhabitants of "the No Chance Saloon
. . . Bedrock Bar, the End of the Line Cafe. . . the last harbor."
(Larry's description) Spacey avoided the temptation to make
Hickey likable; even his first speeches had a sinister motif
that finally became the major theme. With great attention
to detail, British director Howard Davies achieved the necessary
ensemble effect for the inhabitants of the bar; this is a play which
demands focus on both the group as a whole and the individuals,
an effect Davies brought off to perfection. What a pity O'Neill
could not live to see this "Iceman." He often complained
about the productions of his plays, including the l946 "Iceman,"
with Eddie Dowling directing and James Barton miscast as Hickey.
Of the final scene in this production, O'Neill remarked, "If
our American acting and direction cannot hold this scene up without
skimping it, then to hell with our theater."
Long
Day’s Journey into Night
A memorable production of Eugene O’Neill’s tragic
masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night depicts “the four
haunted Tyrones” in a thinly-veiled account of O’Neill’s parents
and his older brother Jamie on one day in their lives in their summer
home in New London, Connecticut. O’Neill presented the manuscript
as a wedding anniversary gift to his wife Carlotta, written, he
says, “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness.”
Carlotta reports that as he worked on the play each day, he would
emerge from his room red-eyed and looking years older than when
he had entered.
The cast of four is perfect in their recreation
of the family that O’Neill, on completing the play, described
to critic and friend George Jean Nathan as “trapped within each
other by the past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning,
loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding
at all, forgiving, but still doomed never to be able to forget.”
Brian Dennehy is father James Tyrone, a famous
actor as was O’Neill’s. Now older, Tyrone realizes that he had sold
out, taken the easy way by touring in trashy money-making melodramas
rather than developing his talent by playing in Shakespeare’s works.
Regretting the loss, he rationalizes that he needed to support his
family, whom he blames rather than himself.  As
the mother, Vanessa Redgrave is brilliant, creating an unforgettable
Mary, with knotted, arthritic hands and large, sad eyes, blank
with morphine. She blames her husband for her addiction, having
been introduced to the drug by a cheap doctor he hired. Philip
Seymour Hoffman is older brother Jamie, drunk most of the time,
ascribing his drinking to his disappointment as a failed actor,
unable to fulfill his father’s expectations. As the three
attempt to escape responsibility by blaming another family member,
Edmund (impressively played by Robert Sean Leonard), the younger
brother in whom O’Neill sees himself, is diagnosed with tuberculosis.
It is feared that his tightfisted father will send him to a state
hospital where the care will be inadequate.
As the play opens on a note of hope, Mary
is home from her “cure” looking rested and healthy But
by the end of act one, she is reverting to her addiction and blaming
the summer house: “I’ve never felt it was my home. It was
wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest
way,” she tells Edmund. “Your father would never spend the money
to make it right.” In the present production, director Robert
Falls sees the woman as central in the family (as he did in his
production of “Death of a Salesman”). Here, Mary is the catalyst
as her sons and husband at first are hopeful and then despair.
It is she who starts them on their journey of guilt with her blames
laid on them for her state – husband James for hiring the doctor
who started her on drugs; Jamie for giving baby Eugene the measles
that led to his death, and Edmund for being born and causing her
pain that could not be relieved except by morphine. Each tries
to escape in a different way, Jamie and his father by drink, Edmund
by going off to sea, and Mary by drugs, but as she says, when James
tells her to “forget the past,” there is no escape: “How can I?
The past is the present isn’t it? It’s the future, too.
We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”
Late in the play,
with hope lost, father James is drinking and playing cards with
Edmund, and in a long speech recounts the hardships of a poverty-stricken
childhood and fears of the poorhouse that led to parsimony and settling
for a moneymaking play when “I could have been a great Shakespearean
actor.”( Mary remembers the tours as “One night stands, cheap hotels,
dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home.”) But
the lure of the “forty thousand net profit…a fortune in those days—or
even in these” kept him touring in the box office success: “What
the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth –“
Mr. Dennehy intelligently realizes that
an actor will drop his “stage English” when at home, and plays the
father with a bog Irish accent, to remind us of his humble beginnings.
O’Neill’s projected final series of plays, of which he wrote only
the first two (“A Touch of the Poet” and “Many Mansions”)
had as its theme the materialism of early immigrants whose pursuit
of gain lost them the opportunity to develop ideals offered by the
new land.
The fog and the
foghorn symbolically surround the family like a blanket of memory.
Other symbols include Mary’s searching, her glasses, and the wedding
dress that she is carrying, in the emotionally devastating final
scene, still seeking her lost life. As Mary in her schoolgirl
voice recalls her early hopes, ending with meeting the famous James
Tyrone, the men despair. In “Long Day’s Journey into Night,”
O’Neill has wrought, through his understanding and forgiveness,
the effect of a true tragedy -- pity and terror. For more on O’Neill’s
life and works and the setting of “Long Day’s Journey,” see Let’s
Celebrate. (Plymouth Theater, 236 W. 45 Street, New York, NY
10036, phone: 212-239-6200)
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