This Day in Theater History (O’Neill’s ‘Iceman’ Cometh to Bway)

October 9, 1946—Premiering at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theater, The Iceman Cometh lasted nearly 4½ hours, featuring drunks in a desperate dive, an implicit challenge to America’s sense of optimism following victory in World War II, a continuation of its playwright’s decades-long argument with God, and a leading man who kept forgetting his lines. The only wonder is that the Theater Guild production made it to 136 performances rather than two.

Eugene O'Neill had finished his tragedy in the 1930s, but held it back from production not only until after the war was finished, but—seemingly just to be on the safe side—for another year on top of that. Evidently, he feared the work would fail.

There were, of course, ways, then and now, to assure that would not happen: notably, compromise with the audience. This O’Neill simply refused to do. He could, for instance, have trimmed any of the innumerable references to “pipe dreams” that fill the play, thereby assuring that suburban playgoers got home at a human hour, but he steadfastly refused to do so.

The playwright who had opened the American stage to more than just melodrama in the 1920s had been largely absent from Broadway since then. Part of the reason was the extraordinarily ambitious project on which the playwright had embarked in the late 1930s, an 11-play, multi-generational cycle on an American family that had occupied him until a devastating neurological disease prevented him from even holding a pencil. But he also feared critical and popular reaction to his projects.

Not surprisingly given its subject matter, the first reviews of Iceman were mixed, with the voice of the opposition summed up most sardonically and memorably by novelist-critic Mary McCarthy: “To audiences accustomed to the oil virtuosity of George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan, the return of a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion.”

Whatever benefit the playwright received from Eddie Dowling, another old theater hand of Irish-American descent unafraid of tackling heavy metaphysical themes (he had previously helmed Philip Barry’s 1938 Here Come the Clowns) was dissipated by the performance of James Barton as traveling salesman Theodore (“Hickey”) Hickman. Barton was not only thrown off by the rhythms of his character’s lines, but also, more basically, by an inability to recall them. The latter turned out to be a huge liability when Barton had to recite Hickey’s climatic, extraordinarily long monologue.

Barton’s subpar performance prematurely convinced many that the role of Hickey was essentially unplayable. It took another decade, with an Off-Broadway revival directed by Jose Quintero and directed by Jason Robards, before critics changed their minds. That production, along with the Broadway premiere of the posthumously published and produced Long Day’s Journey Into Night, led to a more positive reconsideration of O’Neill’s career.

For the purposes of Iceman, many observers came to see that the show was not a mess, but in actuality an acting challenge on the order of King Lear and Hamlet. In the years since, several other actors have taken a crack at Hickey, including James Earl Jones in the 1970s, Jason Roberts (again) in the 1980s, and Kevin Spacey in 1999. (Nathan Lane has been slated to assume the role in a 2012 production at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, with Brian Dennehy as the cynical old anarchist—and O’Neill’s stand-in—Larry Slade.)

Perhaps as no other O’Neill play, Iceman blended immersion in the playwright’s dark past with far wider sociological and theological considerations. America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, as critic Harold Bloom has noted, flew directly against the optimistic Emersonian-Whitmanesque spirit that had long dominated American literature. America’s “main idea,” he noted, just before the opening of his show, “is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.”

In a way, Hickey can be thought of as a kind of counterpart to Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Both fulfill what O’Neill sees as America’s “main idea” by exerting their considerable charisma on polyglot Americans in what amounts to a death mission. Ahab, vowing that he’d “strike the sun if it insulted me,” enlists his crew in his quest to hunt and destroy the white whale that maimed him; Hickey, a reformed alcoholic, seeks to strip each man at Henry Hope’s bar of the illusions or “pipe dreams” that allow them to continue living.

Both O’Neill and Melville make explicit their versions of these uniquely American quests with flag imagery. John Frankenheimer’s 1973 filmed version of the play begins by focusing on the American flag, gradually pulling away to reveal campaign memorabilia. (The year in which the play is set--1912--featured a four-way race among Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene V. Debs.) The major action of Moby Dick concludes with the Pequod slipping beneath the waves as the American Indian Tashtego, obeying Ahab’s final command, is caught in “the act of nailing the flag faster and faster to the subsiding spar.”

One last point. “The thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” O’Neill once told his son Shane. “And strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.” Perhaps in no instance did his ethnicity come into play more than in his tortured relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

As Yale critic Harold Bloom observes, the playwright, coming from a strict, Jansenist background, went on to have a long, lifelong battle with God. O’Neill may have launched his most sustained, if symbolic, assault on the Church with his carefully worked out structure of the characters in Iceman. It’s easy to see the drama as a kind of parody of the Last Supper, with Hickey as a false messiah.

Consider the following points:

• The 12 male figures waiting for Hickey correspond in number to the twelve apostles.

• Hickey, like Christ, attempts to bring about a new order, only to cause consternation among his old friends.

• Don Parritt, the son of Larry Slade’s lover, is the Judas figure in the play, killing himself for betraying his mother, a member of a radical movement.

• Slade, at play’s end, has become the one true convert in the group to Hickey’s unillusioned but hopeless philosophy—like St. Peter, “the rock” upon which Hickey’s/Christ’s vision will remain.

• The three female hookers correspond in number to the three women standing at the foot of the cross for Christ.

Creating The Iceman Cometh was terrifying for O’Neill, since it required him to relive the events of 1912, when, mired in alcoholism, he had attempted to take his own life while helplessly drunk, day after day, at a New York bar called Jimmy the Priest’s. Out of his own personal anguish, he crafted a play with enormous metaphysical implications.

Tony Kushner, probably the one major current American playwright whose theatrical ambition matches O’Neill’s, took note of the theological significance of O’Neill’s work when interviewed several years ago for a PBS documentary of his great theater forebear: “In O'Neill, there's this absolute, sort of God-ordained mission, which is to keep searching, even if in the process he discovers that there is no God. It's a terrifying sort of mandate, but it also I think should be the mandate of all artists, and in a way, of all people."