The Iceman Cometh

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Iceman Cometh, The (1946), a play by Eugene O'Neill. [Martin Beck Theatre, 136 perf.] At Harry Hope's seedy bar, a group of down‐and‐out, besotted regulars live on their booze and their dreams. Besides Harry ( Dudley Digges), a former Tammany ward heeler, the regulars include Harvard‐trained lawyer Willie Oban ( E. G. Marshall), Boer War general Piet Wetjoen ( Frank Tweddell), old newsman James Cameron ( Russell Collins), onetime anarchist Larry Slade ( Carl Benton Reid), and a young, frightened drifter, Dan Paritt ( Paul Crabtree). Into their midst comes hardware salesman Theodore Hickman ( James Barton), more familiarly known as “Hickey.” He tells the barflies he is out for a toot, since his wife is “with the iceman,” and he would make the drinkers rid themselves of “the damned guilt that makes you lie to yourselves you're something you're not, and the remorse that nags at you and makes you hide behind lousy pipe dreams about tomorrow.” One probable effect of Hickey's insistence is to goad Slade into convincing Paritt to commit suicide. But all Hickey's talk goes for naught when he confesses that he has murdered his wife and that the “iceman” is Death. After the police take away Hickey, the men return to their whiskey and their illusions, without which they cannot live. This four‐hour‐long play, based on O'Neill's 1917 short story, “Tomorrow,” and marking his return to the theatre after an absence of twelve years, was welcomed by most critics, albeit with reservations. Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune wrote the Theatre Guild mounting was “mystical and mystifying . . . the stuff of a great and moving tragedy gleams through scene after scene of the drama, but it has not been properly refined.” A superior 1956 revival at the Circle in the Square won the work renewed respect and made José Quintero, who staged it, and Jason Robards Jr., who played Hickey, names to be reckoned with. A highly praised 1985 revival, again with Robards, failed to run, but a 1999 British revival featuring American Kevin Spacey as Hickey was a sellout during its limited run on Broadway.

Iceman Cometh, The, play by Eugene O'Neill, produced and published in 1946.

Harry Hope's run‐down New York saloon and rooming house harbors a group of alcoholics, among them Hope himself, a former Tammany man; Willie Oban, a Harvard Law School graduate; “Jimmy Tomorrow,” a onetime newspaper correspondent; and Larry Slade and Don Parritt, former anarchists. All are guilt‐ridden by their ruined lives and all cling to “pipe dreams” about their condition and the future. They eagerly await a visit from Hickey, a cheerful salesman they consider one of them, though he is outwardly more successful. Upon his arrival to give his annual party, however, the pattern changes because Hickey's traditional joke about his wife and the iceman is not forthcoming, and he threatens the men's pipe dreams with talk of bringing to others the peace he claims to have found through having given up drink and discarded all illusions. Larry sees that Hickey's view that one should “sink down to the bottom of the sea” is poisonous, for “the lie of the pipe dream is what gives life” to people like themselves. In their deprivation they turn to hard, humorless cynicism, Hickey most of all in confessing he killed his wife out of hatred, not to give her peace; Parritt admits he betrayed his mother and anarchism out of hatred. Both in effect commit suicide: Hickey by summoning the police, Parritt by leaping from the fire escape. The idea that Hickey is insane slowly develops as a new pipe dream, allowing the others to resume their old relationships, banter, and illusions, and only Larry, who perceives Hickey as the “Iceman of Death,” remains truly and despairingly aware of reality.