The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

[+ WilliamM]

"Perhaps we are desirous of O’Neill’s brutal intensity now, when our everyday lives can seem bombarded by craven inauthenticity. Wolfe’s imminent “Iceman” production, starring Denzel Washington, is only three seasons removed from Falls’s own revival of the play, at bam. The Bristol Old Vic production of “Long Day’s Journey,” starring Jeremy Irons and the recently Oscar-nominated Lesley Manville, arrives at bam in May. “O’Neill has such passion,” Greenspan marvelled. “It’s unrelenting. And it’s rare to encounter that today.”"

 

Comment: My introduction to O'Neill was also the musical "Take Me Along" with Walter Pidgeon and Jackie Gleason on Broadway in 1960.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/swept-away-by-a-dark-current-the-plays-of-eugene-oneill

Edited March 21, 2018 by WilliamM

[+ nycman]

Damn. Would love to see this, but I can't find good seats

and none of the ticket resellers have anything available.

[+ Awwshuck]

"Perhaps we are desirous of O’Neill’s brutal intensity now, when our everyday lives can seem bombarded by craven inauthenticity. Wolfe’s imminent “Iceman” production, starring Denzel Washington, is only three seasons removed from Falls’s own revival of the play, at bam. The Bristol Old Vic production of “Long Day’s Journey,” starring Jeremy Irons and the recently Oscar-nominated Lesley Manville, arrives at bam in May. “O’Neill has such passion,” Greenspan marvelled. “It’s unrelenting. And it’s rare to encounter that today.”"

 

Comment: My introduction to O'Neill was also the musical "Take Me Along" with Walter Pidgeon and Jackie Gleason on Broadway in 1960.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/swept-away-by-a-dark-current-the-plays-of-eugene-oneill

 

Love the '62 movie version of Long Day's Journey with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson. The 80s television production with Jack Lemmon and Peter Gallagher isnt bad either.

[+ WilliamM]

 

Jeremy Irons in "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

 

Engagement at BAM May 8-24. Perhaps a better choice that "Iceman" on Broadway

[TruthBTold]

I noted it as an aside in another post (and I also noted I was not entirely sure) but does any one know if Eugene O'Neill mandates that performances be done in their entirety and there be no cuts?

[+ WilliamM]

I saw Vanessa Redgrave's understudy in "Long Day's Journey into Night" on Broadway. She was very good. And Ms. Redgrave had every reason to miss a performance; her mother night the day before.

[BasketBaller]

I noted it as an aside in another post (and I also noted I was not entirely sure) but does any one know if Eugene O'Neill mandates that performances be done in their entirety and there be no cuts?

The Shakespeare Theatre in DC did a very good revival of Strange Interlude a few years ago and it was drastically cut-- down to four hours!

[body2body]

The only O'Neill play I've ever seen staged was "The Hairy Ape" at La Jolla Playhouse back in 1993 when Des McAnuff was the artistic director there. It was a very intense 2 hours with no intermission.

[+ WilliamM]

The Theatre

May 7, 2018 Issue

Eugene O’Neill’s Unhappy Hour The New Yorker

In George C. Wolfe’s staging of “The Iceman Cometh,” too much of the talk is sacrificed to keeping the action going.

By Hilton Als

 

 

Illustration by João Fazenda

 

Although there are many performers in George C. Wolfe’s staging of Eugene O’Neill’s phenomenal 1946 four-act and nearly four-hour drama, “The Iceman Cometh” (now in revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs), there is only one actor, and his name is Austin Butler. Most performers want to be seen at any cost, but actors—at least, those as good as Butler—are both determined and relaxed in their ambition to do justice to the playwright’s text while contributing to the life of the story. Butler, making his Broadway début as Don Parritt, an eighteen-year-old lost boy who takes up residence at Harry Hope’s dive bar and hotel on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, illustrates, the moment he takes the stage, the difference between the two. Tall, with fair hair and light-colored eyes, he conveys, through economy of movement and facial expression, what many of his castmates try to show by shouting and grandstanding: his character’s inner life.

 

It’s the summer of 1912, a couple of years before the start of the Great War. The object of Don’s admiration is Larry Slade (David Morse), a handsome and well-built sixty-year-old who has lived at Harry’s for what feels like a long time. Although Larry spends half his waking hours at the bottom of a bottle, he hasn’t gone soft in the middle—or in the mind. The rotgut he swills does little to sweeten his jaundiced outlook on life. When the curtain rises, he’s the only patron who’s even half awake at Harry’s, which is populated by the lowest of the low—dipsomaniacs, they used to be called. Sprawled across wooden tables and chairs, Larry and his fellow-drinkers look like shipwrecked creatures in a murky sea. (Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s lighting is thick with atmosphere, sometimes too thick.) Larry is ruminating with the bartender, Rocky Pioggi (Danny McCarthy), who has a little side business: he’s a pimp, but he doesn’t like being called one; the label doesn’t fit his conception of himself. And that’s the rub of life, isn’t it—that we exist somewhere between who we really are and how we’d like to be perceived?

 

Certainly, Larry feels that way, though it’s sometimes hard to understand what he’s saying, as Morse lays on what must be someone’s idea of turn-of-the-century New Yorkese. (The majority of the cast is similarly affected. And the acoustics of Santo Loquasto’s awkward, voice-muffling set don’t help.) When Larry says he’ll pay for his drinks tomorrow, he knows he’s lying, but there’s no comfort in the truth. What he and his barmates share is a belief in the redemptive quality of fantasy: it keeps you from yourself, whoever that may be—you can figure it out tomorrow. Larry says to Rocky, of his pals, “They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. It’ll be a great day for them, tomorrow—the Feast of All Fools, with brass bands playing!” Carried away by the hooch, he adds:

 

Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regrets and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases! . . . What’s it matter if the truth is that their favoring breeze has the stink of nickel whiskey on its breath, and their sea is a growler of lager and ale, and their ships are long since looted and scuttled and sunk on the bottom? To hell with the truth!

 

Alcohol isn’t the only thing that gets Larry going. He’s a moralist, the play’s Greek chorus. But he’s grown weary of his sense of right and wrong in a world where no one else distinguishes between the two. Drinking helps him construct lyrics in the air. (As with all the fascinating male characters in O’Neill’s late plays—from the cast of his beautiful, ghastly chamber drama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to Jim in “A Moon for the Misbegotten”—getting high frees the poet within.) Still, it was Larry’s strong ethics, and his kindness, that Don loved as a kid. Larry was his mother’s boyfriend back then; they were anarchists. Now Don, stuck between boyhood and manhood, has come looking for answers. He betrayed his mother, but did she deserve it—or was his betrayal a way of holding on to Larry, whom he sees as his only hope for redemption?

 

Most of the cast could have taken a hint from Michael Emerson, who was unforgettable as Willie Oban, the Harvard law student turned drunk, in the 1999 Broadway production, when he said, “Drunks of long standing don’t display the intoxicated mannerisms you see in bad plays. . . . Our drunks are in their natural state, and it takes a lot to get them staggering or slurring.” But Butler’s look of expectation, need, and guilt—his hands pulling slightly at his trousers as the men wait for their friend Theodore Hickman, or Hickey (Denzel Washington), a travelling salesman, to turn up and share a laugh about the outside world—illuminated things about the play that I hadn’t understood before, despite having read it and seen it many times. The way Butler conveyed Don’s tentativeness and his nuanced speech made it clear to me that the character was a stand-in for the playwright’s younger self—that striking boy, consumed by destructive, loving thoughts about his own troubled, morphine-addicted mother.

 

That realization led to another: many of the characters—from the broken-down British officer Cecil Lewis (Frank Wood) and the dilapidated Piet Wetjoen (Dakin Matthews) to Willie (Neal Huff), who drinks, in part, to forget how he has failed his father—inhabit the same story about masculinity, in which Hickey stars as the ultimate fantasy: a nonjudgmental dad. Of course everyone loves Hickey; he’s a salesman who knows how to sell your dreams back to you. When he arrives this time, however, he lacks his usual brio, and he isn’t interested in sharing lies; he wants the men to face the truth not only of who they are but of what they might do beyond these walls. (The only bar patrons who move between Harry’s and the outside world with any frequency are three prostitutes, including Cora, played by Tammy Blanchard, who exposes many wounds in a role that’s often buried under stereotypical tart behavior—lots of squealing and high-pitched antics.) Hickey wants to know what life would be like if stripped of male bravado and self-deception. What his friends don’t notice, because their expectations far exceed their grasp on reality, is that, behind his huckster’s smile, he is descending into madness. The son of a preacher, he knows that Jesus is a con, too, so why can’t he be the world’s—or his world’s—savior?

 

“The Iceman Cometh” is really a novel in speech, and, as with the works of James Joyce, another Irishman in love with language and play, it takes repeated readings and viewings to find the humor mixed in with the disillusionment. Start with the title, which is a reference to Hickey’s joke about his wife getting it on with the iceman while he’s out of town. If the iceman cometh, that means he has cum, and what’s done is done. But you won’t necessarily get the subtleties of O’Neill’s language, those incredible flights upward and then down into the gutter, in this production, because so much of the talk is sacrificed to incomprehensible diction and to keeping the action going.

 

Nothing happens in “The Iceman Cometh.” Then again, everything happens, as Hickey tries to exorcise damage. But what if damage is who you are? The play was first produced thirteen years after Nathanael West published “Miss Lonelyhearts,” another tale about a guy with a Christ complex, and I wonder how much O’Neill drew on that novel when he was shaping Hickey, who personifies the insanity of errant machismo, at once broken and self-glorifying. In his stage work, Washington has sometimes risked letting unpleasantness—a kind of pushiness and inconsolability—show, as he did when playing Troy Maxson, in the 2010 revival of August Wilson’s “Fences.” But Hickey requires something both more and less than that—a searching, lost quality masquerading as a certainty that he himself can’t define. The other big problem with Washington’s performance is that there’s no madness in him. He gets some of Hickey’s church rhythms right, but he uses them to sound more black and less O’Neill. When his Hickey speaks, at the end of the play, of how intolerable his wife’s love was to him, he isn’t consumed by sickening guilt and the stink of his shitty nerves; instead, he sits back in his chair, putting his jacket on, then taking it off again, like a star doing what he has to do to remind audiences that, after all, he has won two Oscars. It’s always a pity when an actor cynically sticks to what he knows will work and leaves it at that. It’s an ungenerous impulse not to try harder than one has to, and it pinches the spectator’s heart. But Butler is the opposite of cynical. He wants to do right by O’Neill, his director, and his fellow-players. And, no matter how much they bray around him, he stands his ground, reacting to what may be pure in them, as performers, with his own purity, the wellspring of his work, which is that of a potentially great artist.

[edjames]

On the other side of the critics notebook s this excellent review from NYTimes:

 

Review: In an Energized ‘Iceman,’ the Drinks are on Denzel

By BEN BRANTLEYAPRIL 26, 2018

If you have a good time at a production of “The Iceman Cometh,” does that mean the show hasn’t done its job? I was beaming like a tickled 2-year-old during much of George C. Wolfe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s behemoth barroom tragedy, which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with Denzel Washington more than earning his salary as its commanding star.

 

A sustained grin may not seem an apt response to a play in which desperate, drunken denial is the given existential condition, and suicide and murder are presented as perfectly reasonable life choices for anyone who sees the world clearly. Besides, to smile through nearly four hours of doomed, rotgut-soaked souls mouthing the same hopeless blather over and over again would appear to be courting lockjaw, if not temporary insanity.

 

Surely, the more appropriate and customary behavior for an “Iceman” audience member would echo that of the play’s cynic-in-chief, a disenchanted socialist (played here with ashen anger by David Morse), who says, “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”

 

But who’s going to feel like nodding off, or slump into terminal angst, when Mr. Wolfe has filled the stage with such delectably seasoned hams, who lap up limelight the way their characters throw back booze? In addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Morse, this “Iceman” boasts a fine rogue’s gallery of performers who gladden the heart whenever they show up on a New York stage, including Colm Meaney, Bill Irwin, Danny McCarthy, Tammy Blanchard, Neal Huff, Reg Rogers, Michael Potts and Frank Wood.

 

The denizens of Harry Hope’s last-chance bar in the downtown Manhattan of 1912 (that’s the wonderful Mr. Meaney as the crankily sentimental Harry) are such a scrappy, funny, madly posturing crew that you may not even share their impatience for the Big Guy to show up. That’s Theodore Hickman, known to his pals as Hickey, who is portrayed by Mr. Washington, this production’s Oscar- and Tony-winning star, and its commercial raison d’être.

 

Hickey, a traveling salesman and perennial life of the party, doesn’t make his entrance until nearly an hour into show. The other characters, who had so eagerly awaited his arrival, wind up hostile to and disappointed with their usually inebriated pal, who has dared to go on the wagon and be really, really serious. Rest assured that you will not feel similarly let down by Mr. Washington’s center-of-gravity performance, or at least not by the play’s conclusion.

 

Mr. Wolfe’s energetic interpretation of this 1946 drama (which a friend of mind suggested should be retitled “The Iceman Rompeth”) is likely to be divisive. Most productions — including Robert Falls’s acclaimed, Chicago-born version starring Nathan Lane, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015 — tend to elicit adjectives like “searing” and “devastating” (on the positive side) and “narcotic” and “way too long” (on the negative).

 

After all, this is a work in which life is revealed, none too subtly, to be so crushing that the only way to get through it is to live in a cloud of illusions, or pipe dreams, to use one of O’Neill’s favorite terms. The characters employed to illustrate this point — a group of outcasts and also-rans who hide their heads in whiskey bottles and carefully tended rationalizations — are, as drunks often tend to be, an unbearably garrulous lot.

 

That means that in addition to being one of the longest of great American plays, “Iceman” is also one of the most repetitive. You pretty much get everything it has to say during the first 20 minutes or so.

 

O’Neill wasn’t wrong, though, in the self-admiring assessment he made in a 1940 letter to the critic George Jean Nathan, to whom he had sent an early draft. “I feel there are moments in it,” he wrote, “that hit as deeply into the farce and humor and pity and ironic tragedy of life as anything in modern drama.”

 

Watching this latest incarnation, I laughed more often than I teared up. But this “Iceman” — which has been beautifully designed by Santo Loquasto (the increasingly abstract set), Ann Roth (costumes), Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (the wondrous, color-coded lighting) and sound (Dan Moses Schreier) — acquires its own poignant lyricism, while vividly reminding us that in life, comedy and tragedy are seldom mutually exclusive.

 

With its heightened performances and tone-poem visuals, this production also clearly elicits the musical nature of “Iceman,” which is in some ways closer to opera or oratorio than it is to conventional drama. On the page, its words can seem as blunt and cipher-like as notes on a musical staff.

 

It is when you hear them spoken that they spring into interconnected life. All those repeated phrases take on the haunting insistence of melodic motifs. We’re reminded that all of us, no matter how we like to think otherwise, tend to be stuck in a single song of identity, on which we render only slight variations.

 

The cast members here capture that monotony, to which their characters cling like a security blanket. And they exaggerate it to highly entertaining effect, in their arias and overlapping duets of lamentation and accusation. In fabricating their hopeful visions of their hopeless lives, O’Neill’s barflies are always performing, for themselves as well as the others.

 

How right it feels that each of the men who have made Harry’s dive and boardinghouse their home — first seen as in a “Last Supper”-like tableau of sleeping figures — should stir to life when a subtle spotlight picks him out. They’re each as enticingly grotesque as a caricature by Goya or Daumier, thanks in part to their distinctively disheveled coifs. (Mia M. Neal did the great and essential hair and wigs.)

 

I don’t have space to do a full roll call, as Larry Slade (Mr. Morse) does for the benefit of the newest and youngest resident, Don Parritt (the open-faced Austin Butler, in a sensationally assured Broadway debut). But for inhabitants of a place regularly characterized as a morgue, they are an exceptionally vibrant group. They love telling their lies, and these actors (whose profession, after all, is lying) love giving flamboyant life to such falsehoods.

 

And then good old Hickey shows up, with his toothy smile and goofy jokes. At first, he seems to fit right in, as expected. But since he is portrayed by Mr. Washington, a specialist in layers of feeling, we notice an unsettling, even menacing blankness whenever his face is in repose. You know exactly what Mr. Butler’s character means when he says of Hickey, “There’s something that isn’t human behind his damned grinning and kidding.”

 

That’s not just because Hickey is on a mission to save his former drinking buddies from their delusions, to make them face reality, as he swears he has done. More than any Hickey I’ve seen (including Kevin Spacey and,

and

), Mr. Washington makes us sense that Hickey hasn’t entirely bought his own bill of truth-peddling goods.

 

Hickey’s long, revelatory monologue at the end of Act IV — when he explains the events that turned him from carefree party boy into a cold-sober judge of others — is often delivered as a flashy nervous breakdown to the rest of the cast. In this version, Hickey moves a chair to the edge of the stage and delivers his soliloquy naturalistically, right to us.

 

As he keeps trying — and failing — to justify himself, a chill creeps over the audience. That’s when I stopped smiling. The party is finally, truly over, and so are the lies within lies. And suddenly Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Washington have slapped us with that mother of all hangovers, which for O’Neill is life itself.