Theater Review: Denzel in a brilliant "The Iceman Cometh" on Broadway
The Iceman Cometh
Written by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Starring Denzel Washington, David Morse, and Colm Meaney
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan
April 5, 2018
The best plays, like The Iceman Cometh, are both timeless and specifically resonant to many eras. I had the privilege to see this outstanding production just after Easter/Passion week, and alongside many specials on cable TV about the last days of Martin Luther King. The play resonated with both. O’Neill’s mini-passion play is set wholly in a bar, featuring 12 drunken “apostles” (13 male characters, but the day and night bartenders alternate onstage) who await an arriving “Christ” figure (Hickey, a salesman played by the wonderful Denzel Washington), a “Judas” (the young Don Parrot, who guiltily commits suicide after betraying his socialist mother to authorities) and three “women at the cross” (the three hookers). The play is most famous for the recurring word and theme of “pipedream”. Each drunken character has failed in life, yet holds out expectations that they will fix their problems despite all evidence to the contrary, including their inability to leave the bar. O’Neill’s religion is a cynical one. These hapless characters represent all of mankind, including the army, police, revolutionaries, a doctor, a lawyer, and an academic. Yet all base their year around the annual appearance of Hickey, who will arrive in their midst to buy drinks, entertain them with crude jokes (e.g. about the iceman sleeping with his wife) and generally divert them from their failed dreams. This annual visit is a sort of religious ceremony, with Hickey as the messiah. The play is set up with Act I as anticipation of Hickey’s arrival capped by “Palm Sunday” when he joyously enters, Act II’s “Last Supper” set at a birthday party, Act III’s dispersal of the disciples, then the Act IV deaths of Hickey/Christ and Don/Judas. But Hickey is no conventional messiah. When this year he fails to deliver on the men’s religious hopes of reassurance and diversion with free drinks and instead pushes them out of the bar to try to get their lives going, he fails to deliver their religious expectations, and passion-like, falls headlong. O’Neill thinks that we, desperate for salvation, cannot provide for ourselves and thus create our own messiahs, who often fall short of expectations--a point of view resonant in the Trump era. While the passion play symbolic overlay is not crucial to the 3½ hour play’s success, recognition of the subtext further universalizes the plot and allows one to appreciate the play’s textual references to drinking vinegar, Christ/crucifixion, and resurrection. The play works equally well as both a working class and symbolic tragedy.
Director George Wolfe (Angels in America, The Normal Heart, Shuffle Along) sets the play minimally, without even the usual bar trappings except in Act 3. This focuses us on the characters, most notably in Hickey’s famous Act IV 15 minute monologue, here set spotlighted with Hickey far downstage speaking directly to the audience, with the interjections of the others coming from near-darkness. The monologue is Wagner-like, largely a chronology of events, yet the performer must overlay this with growing pain and vulnerability. The downstage spotlighting in this production creates all the more pressure on Washington. Here the monologue felt both messianic and operatic. Opera composers often build tension within a long aria or monologue by providing short interjections from other performers; e.g. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde long Act II love duet, with Brangäne interjecting “Watch out!”. This performance was still a preview, and Denzel Washington’s monologue had a few slips, but he handled them artfully, making the monologue less Shakespearean and more of an honest confession. The role of Hickey is a strange one. Hickey’s entrance is delayed for over an hour; he enters in ribald joy, but then spends an act as a preachy wet blanket (on the mens's hopes), then ends with this grueling monologue. The role attracts the best performers (Jason Robards, Nathan Lane, Kevin Spacey, James Earl Jones) and is one of those tests like Hamlet, Lear, Violet Weston, and Blanche DuBois that defines acting excellence. Mr. Washington is fully up to this standard, mixing humility, power, and vulnerability. He both dominates the stage and blends into the crowd, as he should. I suspect the monologue will grow in assurance and power as he gains more experience with it…I would enjoy seeing him again at the end of the run. He clearly met the test in this role, but should improve with time. The director and set designer add subtle passion play visual cues; Act 2’s birthday dinner is arrayed as The Last Supper, and a thin support beam rises midstage as a sort of crucifix.
Unlike Macbeth, A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman, this great play is fragile, highly dependent on outstanding direction and acting by the whole cast as well as by the stars. The 1947 premiere failed due to a scared and hesitant Hickey, and only became regarded as an outstanding play a decade later after a legendary revival with Frederic March and a young Jason Robards. The standouts in the current version include the failed cop Henry Hope played by Colm Meaney (Miles on Star Trek Next Gen and Star Trek Deep Space Nine) with outstanding humor and pathos, and the depressive “cemetery man” Larry Slade, played by David Morse (House, John Adams). Slade is the moral conscience of the play, refusing to give into pipedreams, but thus committing himself to a future only committed to death. While O’Neill seems to prefer this to the denial and pipedreams of the others, it suggests a bleak outcome for humankind. The wonderful Act III, in which most of the drunks optimistically leave the bar after inducement from Hickey, only to predictably slink back in before Act IV, is one of the most brilliant constructions in theater and was excellently staged by Mr Wolfe, who imbued the 10 sequential exits from the stage with variety and tension.
In O’Neill’s theology we must either retreat into religious/substance abuse denial, or grimly accept mortality and life’s misfortune, with death as the only exit. O’Neill died in a hotel room, ravaged by the debilitations of depression, alcoholism and a Parkinson-like syndrome that made him unable to write. The Iceman Cometh reflects his wrestling with mortality and rejection of the Irish Catholic religion of his youth (see also James Joyce). This powerful production of one of his best plays reminds us of our frailness, yet elevates this collective frailty into a collective ethos of Mankind.
Written by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Starring Denzel Washington, David Morse, and Colm Meaney
Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan
April 5, 2018
The best plays, like The Iceman Cometh, are both timeless and specifically resonant to many eras. I had the privilege to see this outstanding production just after Easter/Passion week, and alongside many specials on cable TV about the last days of Martin Luther King. The play resonated with both. O’Neill’s mini-passion play is set wholly in a bar, featuring 12 drunken “apostles” (13 male characters, but the day and night bartenders alternate onstage) who await an arriving “Christ” figure (Hickey, a salesman played by the wonderful Denzel Washington), a “Judas” (the young Don Parrot, who guiltily commits suicide after betraying his socialist mother to authorities) and three “women at the cross” (the three hookers). The play is most famous for the recurring word and theme of “pipedream”. Each drunken character has failed in life, yet holds out expectations that they will fix their problems despite all evidence to the contrary, including their inability to leave the bar. O’Neill’s religion is a cynical one. These hapless characters represent all of mankind, including the army, police, revolutionaries, a doctor, a lawyer, and an academic. Yet all base their year around the annual appearance of Hickey, who will arrive in their midst to buy drinks, entertain them with crude jokes (e.g. about the iceman sleeping with his wife) and generally divert them from their failed dreams. This annual visit is a sort of religious ceremony, with Hickey as the messiah. The play is set up with Act I as anticipation of Hickey’s arrival capped by “Palm Sunday” when he joyously enters, Act II’s “Last Supper” set at a birthday party, Act III’s dispersal of the disciples, then the Act IV deaths of Hickey/Christ and Don/Judas. But Hickey is no conventional messiah. When this year he fails to deliver on the men’s religious hopes of reassurance and diversion with free drinks and instead pushes them out of the bar to try to get their lives going, he fails to deliver their religious expectations, and passion-like, falls headlong. O’Neill thinks that we, desperate for salvation, cannot provide for ourselves and thus create our own messiahs, who often fall short of expectations--a point of view resonant in the Trump era. While the passion play symbolic overlay is not crucial to the 3½ hour play’s success, recognition of the subtext further universalizes the plot and allows one to appreciate the play’s textual references to drinking vinegar, Christ/crucifixion, and resurrection. The play works equally well as both a working class and symbolic tragedy.
Director George Wolfe (Angels in America, The Normal Heart, Shuffle Along) sets the play minimally, without even the usual bar trappings except in Act 3. This focuses us on the characters, most notably in Hickey’s famous Act IV 15 minute monologue, here set spotlighted with Hickey far downstage speaking directly to the audience, with the interjections of the others coming from near-darkness. The monologue is Wagner-like, largely a chronology of events, yet the performer must overlay this with growing pain and vulnerability. The downstage spotlighting in this production creates all the more pressure on Washington. Here the monologue felt both messianic and operatic. Opera composers often build tension within a long aria or monologue by providing short interjections from other performers; e.g. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde long Act II love duet, with Brangäne interjecting “Watch out!”. This performance was still a preview, and Denzel Washington’s monologue had a few slips, but he handled them artfully, making the monologue less Shakespearean and more of an honest confession. The role of Hickey is a strange one. Hickey’s entrance is delayed for over an hour; he enters in ribald joy, but then spends an act as a preachy wet blanket (on the mens's hopes), then ends with this grueling monologue. The role attracts the best performers (Jason Robards, Nathan Lane, Kevin Spacey, James Earl Jones) and is one of those tests like Hamlet, Lear, Violet Weston, and Blanche DuBois that defines acting excellence. Mr. Washington is fully up to this standard, mixing humility, power, and vulnerability. He both dominates the stage and blends into the crowd, as he should. I suspect the monologue will grow in assurance and power as he gains more experience with it…I would enjoy seeing him again at the end of the run. He clearly met the test in this role, but should improve with time. The director and set designer add subtle passion play visual cues; Act 2’s birthday dinner is arrayed as The Last Supper, and a thin support beam rises midstage as a sort of crucifix.
Unlike Macbeth, A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman, this great play is fragile, highly dependent on outstanding direction and acting by the whole cast as well as by the stars. The 1947 premiere failed due to a scared and hesitant Hickey, and only became regarded as an outstanding play a decade later after a legendary revival with Frederic March and a young Jason Robards. The standouts in the current version include the failed cop Henry Hope played by Colm Meaney (Miles on Star Trek Next Gen and Star Trek Deep Space Nine) with outstanding humor and pathos, and the depressive “cemetery man” Larry Slade, played by David Morse (House, John Adams). Slade is the moral conscience of the play, refusing to give into pipedreams, but thus committing himself to a future only committed to death. While O’Neill seems to prefer this to the denial and pipedreams of the others, it suggests a bleak outcome for humankind. The wonderful Act III, in which most of the drunks optimistically leave the bar after inducement from Hickey, only to predictably slink back in before Act IV, is one of the most brilliant constructions in theater and was excellently staged by Mr Wolfe, who imbued the 10 sequential exits from the stage with variety and tension.
In O’Neill’s theology we must either retreat into religious/substance abuse denial, or grimly accept mortality and life’s misfortune, with death as the only exit. O’Neill died in a hotel room, ravaged by the debilitations of depression, alcoholism and a Parkinson-like syndrome that made him unable to write. The Iceman Cometh reflects his wrestling with mortality and rejection of the Irish Catholic religion of his youth (see also James Joyce). This powerful production of one of his best plays reminds us of our frailness, yet elevates this collective frailty into a collective ethos of Mankind.
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