You can hear the sound of snoring echoing from the rafters of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater during The Iceman Cometh. Well, why not? Eugene O’Neill’s 1939 play forces its audience to pass nearly five hours in the intermittently coherent company of bums and boozers, whores and madmen. Surely the occasional catnap is called for.
Maybe. But that snoring is onstage only.
Robert Falls’ nearly perfect production, which held the Brooklyn audience rapt for an almost indefensible length of time, begins with a chorus of snuffling from the soaks and souses slumped against tables in the early hours of the morning at Harry Hope’s saloon. They should be off in their rented rooms, slumbering fitfully in their louse-ridden beds. But the traveling salesman Hickey is due to arrive and when he appears, it’s free drinks for all. So not a man will climb the stairs.
Once you hear those first wheezes, once you discover the bodies barely illumined by Natasha Katz’s sculptural, tenebrous lighting, you know that you are in the presence of theatrical virtuosity. Falls’ command may falter slightly in the last act (Hickey’s long confessional would undo just about anyone), but he mostly manages the remarkable feat of confirming the greatness of O’Neill’s play without disguising any of its infelicities and insufficiencies.
O’Neill is an odd one. He is perhaps our greatest American playwright, without being an especially good one. His plays, for the most part, are unrelenting and often exhausting – strange brews of naturalism and expressionism. He hits a point home and keeps right on hitting. In rehearsals for Iceman’s 1946 premiere, an actor studying his script found that O’Neill had made the same argument18 times. O’Neill countered that he meant to make it 18 times. He wrote Iceman as a lark, a reprieve from his work on Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Leave it to O’Neill to end a lightsome diversion in suicide and despondency. As O’Neill wrote, it’s “a big kind of comedy that doesn’t stay funny very long”.
Falls hasn’t lessened any of that overemphasis, but his staging is so assured and that it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it might. Falls finds rhythms in the speeches and in the movements of the scenes, too. His direction is orchestral so that the repetitions become less redundancy than leitmotif. The design elements, which include Kevin Depinet’s shabby, lowering set and Merrily Murray-Walsh’s tatty, sociological costumes, mingle dextrously and help to ease the shifts in style.
And if there’s an award for casting, let’s bestow it on Adam Belcuore, CSA. Each inhabitant of Harry Hope’s is fully realized and distinct, from Stephen Ouimette as the agoraphobic Harry to Brian Dennehy’s “foolosopher” Larry to John Douglas Thompson’s formerly flash Joe, torn between opposing the casual racism that surrounds him and accepting it in hope of one more drink of Harry’s rotgut, “cyanide cut with carbolic acid to give it a mellow flavor”.
Nathan Lane makes a fine, mercurial Hickey, a man who could “make a cat laugh”. With his sleek moustache, bulging belly, and straw boater he has the look of a vaudeville comic. His bonhomous mission – to free Harry’s denizens from their pipe dreams, the false fantasies that each harbors about himself – yields only desolation and despair. If Lane can’t get the better of Hickey’s fourth-act speech, which climaxes too early and too often, I wouldn’t like to try it. Elsewhere, his performance emphasizes the script’s bleak humor and how cold and terrifying it feels when the jokes all stop.
Or do they? Human life, O’Neill suggests, is the biggest joke of all. As the anarchist Hugo says, when aroused from his stupor, “So ve get drunk and ve laugh like hell and den ve die, and de pipe dream vanish!” Well, the pipe dreams may vanish, but if you’ve seen this Iceman, expect its opiate smoke to linger for a long time.
