The Uses of Illusion

By L.M.

HUGHIE

by EUGENE O'NEILL

A true Irishman, Eugene O'Neill was a connoisseur of illusion and self-deceit. He knew they were not necessarily a poison, but often a nourishment, a kind of grace. The seediest dreams, tended like a campfire, served at least to make the emptier expanses of the soul more habitable. O'Neill explored the idea most thoroughly in The Iceman Cometh, which he wrote in 1939. Two years later, he stated it with a succinct force in Hughie, a one-act play that he planned as part of a series called "By Way of Obit."

Hughie, now being presented at the First Chicago Center in Chicago, is virtually a monologue, spoken like a Runyonesque incantation by Erie Smith (Ben Gazzara), a small-time hustler and horseplayer. Erie ("I was dragged up in Erie, P-A--some punk burg") returns early one morning in 1928 to his fleabag hotel, after a five-day binge. With a snappy-brim hat, stubble on his chin, a nearly empty pint in his pocket and a cigarette wheeze that makes his fits of laughter sound like emphysema, Erie has the jauntiness of a doomed sucker.

His drunk was a homage of mourning to his friend Hughie, the hotel's night clerk, who has just died. Hughie had per formed the almost ecclesiastical function of believing in Erie's shabby bravado, his tales of bedding girls from the Follies and beating the cards and dice, of winning on the "bangtails" at the track and the time in New Orleans he lit a cigar with a C-note. Hughie was his audience, the receptacle of the deceits that keep Erie alive. Charley (Peter Maloney), the new clerk, listens in the dim lobby with a sort of it-takes-all-kinds distraction, but eventually and subtly is transformed into the new Hughie, Erie's collaborator in his own illusions.

Ben Gazzara plays Erie superbly, with a banty feistiness that keeps him more or less on the livable side of terror. As he says, "If every guy along Broadway who kids himself was to drop dead, there wouldn't be nobody left."

L.M.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.