 |
|
|
|
|
|
The New York Times, April 18, 1999 Only on the Stage Does 'Iceman' Truly Come Alive By VINCENT CANBYForget the theorists for the moment.
The first thing you should know about "The Iceman Cometh,"
Howard Davies' brilliant Anglo-American production of the Eugene
O'Neill classic, is that it sends you out of the Brooks Atkinson
Theater in Manhattan on a high of excitement you probably haven't
experienced in years.
Like some spellbinding pitchman, it psychs you up. You will want to talk about it immediately, but not only about O'Neill's subversive genius and the mastery of this particular production. The revelation here is the ability of great theater to transform the most unlikely material into the kind of enriching, revivifying experience that defines art, no matter what the subject, or when it was created, or for whom it might have been intended. O'Neill wrote "The Iceman Cometh" in something of a white heat in a matter of months in 1939. It comes out of the playwright's experiences when he was in his 20s, knocking around New York before World War I, living in flophouses, often depressed and sometimes suicidal. The achievement of the Davies production is to rediscover the timelessness of a present-day that few of us could ever have known. For reasons that remain mysterious, it seems especially moving today. When "The Iceman Cometh" was first produced on Broadway in 1946, the critics welcomed it, though with reservations, and it ran for only 136 performances. No surprise. Everything about it was an insult to America's can-do sense of itself in the years immediately after World War II. It also displeased those who believed that theater has an obligation, if only in terms of drama, to demonstrate something more than what one critic described as O'Neill's "automatic pessimism." Even Harold Clurman, the theater director who was also one of our most enlightened critics, responded to that initial production by saying flatly that "the world cannot be represented by a bunch of drunks who fail to do anything." That's as good a description as any
for the habitues of Harry Hope's dank, dispirited skid row bar in
1912, which is the setting for "The Iceman Cometh." Yet it
doesn't encompass the entire theatrical equation as you watch the
play. O'Neill's characters -- worn-out anarchists, failed con
artists, drifters, former Tammany Hall gofers, whores, pimps,
informers, society's dregs -- perform on the stage, but their
theatrical validity depends on the collective response of the
audience. That is, on our recognition and acceptance of them.
The members of the theater audience, for which O'Neill originally wrote, were not keen on filling in the blanks. They wanted to be told exactly what to think. Yet for all of the biographical details the playwright gives us, the characters remain at heart ambiguous. Most are long gone in alcoholism. They are other people. They inhabit a world of frozen twilight, where life is either a terrifying hangover or a dream so anesthetizing that, from time to time, they can safely believe in a better tomorrow: the day they will get straight. Such are their pipe dreams. O'Neill, himself an alcoholic, wrote about these characters not as theoretical types but as people he knew: with compassion, raucous humor, impatience and fury. About none of them did he write with more vitriol and self-loathing than Theodore Hickman, the play's spooky catalyst, the fast-talking traveling salesman (hardware) fondly called Hickey by the other barflies at Harry Hope's. This is the role that made a star of Jason Robards in Jose Quintero's celebrated 1956 Circle in the Square production of "Iceman," and in which Kevin Spacey is now giving the finest, most fiendishly mesmerizing performance of the Broadway season to date. For years, Hickey has been showing up at the bar for one of his "periodicals," or epic binges, to celebrate Harry Hope's birthday and to stand everyone in the joint for an extended siege of serious boozing. Until this visit, nobody has given much thought to Hickey except as a fellow who spends money freely and tells great "iceman" jokes. To be sure, he is not really like them. He is always neat and clean, at least at the beginning of a "periodical." He makes a decent living, he is as generous with his ear as he is with his cash, and he has an adoring, faithful wife in Astoria, who forgives him his trespasses. It is as if the barflies accepted Hickey as a kind of fiction, someone who certifies the pipe dreams each has about himself without making any demands. Hickey is glorious timeout. This visit, however, is different. Even before Hickey appears toward the end of the first act, Cora, the bar's senior whore, reports that she has just run into him down the block and that he sends word he has come to "save" his old pals. Harry Hope, who hasn't stepped foot outside his bar since his beloved wife, Bessie, died 20 years earlier, says it is simply Hickey's way of setting up an elaborate gag. The others aren't too sure, and they are right. Hickey is a new man. Even as he is buying his first round of drinks, he announces that he himself has gone off the sauce and found peace. His mission: to help his friends find the salvation that has given him his new, clearly messianic serenity. How has he done it? He has recognized the emptiness of the pipe dreams that allowed him to live through endless cycles of drinking and whoring, that tore apart his beloved wife and that swamped him in guilt insupportable. Hickey is not a salesman for nothing. Within a few hours, he has convinced Harry Hope to take that long-planned walk around the neighborhood and to admit that he actually loathed the beloved Bessie. Cora and her lover, whom she largely supports, attempt to get to New Jersey to marry. Cecil Lewis, the florid old English army captain, and Piet Wetjoen, the Afrikaner general, drinking partners since they appeared together in the Boer War spectacle at the 1903 St. Louis World's Fair, make feeble plans to return home. As Hickey's crusade advances, the alcohol seems to lose its kick. A sense of desolation takes hold as each attempt to emulate Hickey fails. Watching all this with uneasy skepticism is Larry Slade, the dropout anarchist whose pipe dream is that he longs for death, though he clings to life by his finger tips. Hickey, he suggests, has brought his friends death, not life. Larry has Hickey's number, but then Larry is as unrelenting in his way as Hickey. "The Iceman Cometh" is not an easy text to read. Only Hickey and, to a lesser extent, Larry, appear to have lives of their own. O'Neill's attempts to write dialect phonetically are almost impossible to decipher. The play is schematic and repetitive. Every speech seems to go on too long. Every plot revelation is inevitably telegraphed. Yet on its feet, in a production of this grace and magnitude, "The Iceman Cometh" becomes soaring theater. The difference between the text and the production is the difference between a score read by an amateur and the same score played by a full orchestra. There are 19 characters in the play, all but two of them onstage for most of the four-hours-plus running time. The result is a theatrical panorama of a sort not seen in the New York theater since the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "Nicholas Nickleby." It is not the spectacle that impresses, but the creation of a virtual community, which, in turn, gives you a visual equivalent to the expansiveness of the mind that created this world. O'Neill thought big and thoroughly. Characters are important not only for themselves, but also for their relations to each other and to their environment. Anyone who thinks he knows the play from either Sidney Lumet's 1960 television adaptation, also starring Mr. Robards, or from John Frankenheimer's 1973 movie version, in which Lee Marvin played Hickey, should be suitably surprised by what he finds on the Brooks Atkinson stage. One of the essential joys of the production is the way the eye is allowed to wander at will, from a couple of characters having a furious argument at stage left to the old fellow who has passed out cold, downstage right, or to the impassive face of Rocky, the bartender, viewing all from his station upstage right. "The Iceman Cometh" cannot be reduced to a succession of close-ups, medium shots and long shots without sabotaging the playwright's vision. As seen on the stage, the play is an organic entity, the physical form of which becomes an act of compassion in that, as we examine this community, we are constantly reminded that each character is equally important. People who make movie and television adaptations can't afford to give you this freedom, possibly afraid you might not know where to look, as well as all too aware that it would slow down the action. Among other things, the Davies production, which began life last year at the Almeida Theater in London, is ensemble work of remarkable balance. By that I mean to salute the contributions of everyone on-stage and off, from Bob Crowley (set and costume design) and Mark Henderson (lighting) to the breathtaking cast led by Mr. Spacey, who also starred in London. The New York cast includes actors from the London company, supplemented by American actors so seamlessly cast that you wouldn't know they hadn't all been marooned in Harry Hope's saloon for the last 20 years. Though Mr. Spacey's Hickey gives the production its focal point, the performance, as fine as it is, is not the entire show. I think also of Tim Piggot-Smith as the supposedly self-contained Larry Slade, a moralist possibly even more vicious than Hickey; of Michael Emerson (you should remember him as Oscar Wilde in "Gross Indecency"), as the lost son and heir of a discredited bucket shop tycoon; of James Hazeldine's Harry Hope; of Patrick L. Godfrey and Ed Dixon, as the mutually dependent English army captain and Boer general, and of Clarke Peters, as a once successful uptown gambling figure, now rummy but still articulate -- a black character that could have been written yesterday. Note, too, Robert Sean Leonard as the desperate, no longer radical son of a fiery West Coast organizer who sounds a lot like Emma Goldman, and Katie Finneran as the boozy but still beautiful Cora, the tart who dreams of a farm in New Jersey, but who settles for a cubicle in a flophouse. You won't be able to avoid Ms. Finneran's expression as, near the end of the performance, Cora sits stoically, stage center, en route to oblivion once again. That image, unsentimental and brutally fixed, provides the evening with its haunting coda. |
|
© Copyright 1999-2015 eOneill.com |
