When Robert Falls staged The Iceman Cometh at Goodman Theatre in 1990, I raved about it here in the Reader, calling it “great. Excessively great. Great in its excess. Four and a half hours of an obsessed poet named Eugene O’Neill, doing everything any dramaturge would tell him he absolutely can’t do and coming out of it standing firmly on his two dark, transcendent feet. If this were just a play it would be wildly misshapen and repetitive and wordy; but this isn’t just a play: It’s the truth. And therefore perfect.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I can’t say I’d express myself that way now, if only because I have no idea what I might’ve meant by “two dark, transcendent feet.” Still, with Falls’s mighty new revival of the same play to refresh my memory, I can’t say I was wrong, either. The Iceman Cometh really is a masterpiece of excess. Again, as I wrote in 1990, “Do most dramas take a little time at the start to set up the premise and introduce the players? Iceman takes forever. Do most dramas provide a big final moment for the protagonist? Iceman’s final moment is enormous. . . . No point can be made once; it has to be made a dozen times. At least.”
Only a good chunk of time has to pass before the guy actually walks into that bar. O’Neill spends the play’s first 70 minutes or so doing the theatrical equivalent of a slow pan across the back room of Harry Hope’s saloon, circa 1912, acquainting us with the great clan of lost souls taking refuge there. We’ve got Willie the Harvard-educated lawyer, Ed who used to run a concession at a circus, and Joe the black “gamblin’ man” who once had a betting parlor of his own. There’s one contingent of “tarts”—Pearl, Margie, and Cora—and another of Boer War vets, including former correspondent James (nicknamed “Jimmy Tomorrow” because that’s when he plans to get back to work) and a pair of adversaries-turned-pals, Cecil and Piet. Old anarchist agitators Hugo and Larry have a table of their own, where the former passes out between rants and the latter makes a show of welcoming death. Then there’s Harry Hope himself, who hasn’t set foot outside the premises since his wife died 20 years ago.
With his sad-eyed ebullience, his hail-fellow angst, Nathan Lane was born to play Hickey. And, sure enough, he’s marvelous. All glory to Nathan Lane. But this Iceman is overwhelmingly an ensemble triumph. In the last Goodman main-stage show, Camino Real, director Calixto Bieito put strong actors in abject situations and ended up creating what came across to me as an atmosphere of abuse, as if the point were to belittle the cast members themselves. Here, too, some of the company have to abandon their vanity in order to embody their roles—after all, this is a play about ruined old alcoholics. And yet this time they’re ennobled in the process. John Reeger’s Cecil, in particular, falls into that category. But we also get brave, unselfish work from Brian Dennehy as Larry, Stephen Ouimette as Harry, and James Harms as Jimmy.
Through 6/10: Tue-Sat 7 PM, Sun 1:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $53-$119.
