Re-Creating a Stage Legend the Iceman Cometh
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
Jason Robards was a journeyman actor when he auditioned for Director Jose Quintero in 1956 for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. After reading for another role, Robards asked for a chance to try the climactic final monologue of the central character, Hickey, a backslapping little salesman some two decades older than the lean, magisterial Robards was then. Of the reading, Quintero says: "The way he peeled away Hickey's cheerful front to get to the madness and guilt underneath was terrifying." Robards got the part, the production established both him and Quintero as major forces in the theater, and they began a collaboration that led Quintero to direct most of O'Neill's major plays and Robards to essay most of his greatest characters. Both men came to be haunted by O'Neill's melancholy, his Celtic love of self- ruin. Now, 28 years later, they have revived the production for Broadway.
The risks were considerable. It is never easy to compete with a theater legend, even of one's own making. The play itself, a 4 1/2-hour tragedy about the pitiable denizens of a flyblown bar, lacks obvious commercial appeal. And as the central figure, the best-liked man, Robards must torment his friends, show himself capable of cold-blooded murder, then celebrate his certain doom. The women in the play are all prostitutes, and family life is seen only as a remembered torment. The text is rich in humor, but much of it verges on the cruel or the macabre. The jokes are mostly preposterous self-justifications or savage put-downs of those near by. It is hard for an audience to laugh at Iceman without feeling it is further belittling these shriveled lives. Indeed, during a tryout at the Kennedy Center in Washington, spectators seemed to respond to the play's bleakness, not its raucous wit.
Nonetheless, the revival is a triumph. Robards' broad grin and quick-jigging movement at first belie and then reinforce his harrowing depiction of a man obsessed with self-hatred. He rockets around the stage with the febrile energy of a revivalist on skid row, but his every assertion is tinged with mockery. Although he claims to have seen the light, he is on a spree of destruction, not salvation. He wants to deprive his pals of their last shred of dignity, their dreams of resurrecting the past. Hickey was always a sometime drunk, still connected to the world of work and family. As he sees himself slipping, he tries to take everyone with him. He hurtles toward the unmasked truth and hopes that seeing it will turn him to stone.
The same distortion of the soul destroys the people around Hickey, including, in more winsome but still painful performances, Barnard Hughes as a burned-out barkeep and Donald Moffat as a former anarchist who cannot decide whether he is more afraid of dying or of going on living. O'Neill gives each of the 17 barflies a revelatory scene, and every actor in this superb cast proves capable of that moment at center stage. The ensemble's energized acting, an apparent clash with the passivity of the text, emphasizes O'Neill's redemptive theme: that everyone, no matter how close to oblivion, yearns for hope and thrives on dreams. The basic action is Hickey's journey toward the abyss. But the uplifting message is that his potential victims may look, yet are wise enough to draw away before they tumble in.