Category Archives: Eugene O’Neill

Ezra Pound’s anti-theatrical prejudice

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Ezra Pound in 1967.

Ezra Pound in 1967.

Unlike the situation in continental Europe, the relationship between Modernism and the English-language stage has always been uneasy. Several “High Modernists” wrote for the stage — Yeats, Eliot, Stein, and notoriously Henry James — but, at least in the American drama, Modernist trends were never fully embraced. In America, only Eugene O’Neill wrestled with these ideas and sensibilities at length. Most of the plays of his middle period were attempts to fuse his Modernist sensibilities with the American tradition of melodrama (according to Marc Robinson, melodrama may be the most pervasive and characteristic genre to be found in American theatre), which sought to elicit emotional responses from the collective audience through the manipulation of plot and character, leading, more often than not, to a “happy” ending that satisfied audiences. But somehow it never quite worked. In O’Neill, the Modernist and the Melodramatist were in constant struggle throughout his plays of the 1920s and 1930s. The struggle, more often than not, came to a draw.

Among the High American Modernists it would be hard to find a Higher one than Ezra Pound. Though he translated both Greek tragedies and Noh plays, he never felt the necessity to write directly for the stage himself. In September 1915, James Joyce sent the manuscript of his play Exiles to Pound for his comments, which elicited from Pound this characteristically spiky, polemical response about the theatre in general:

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim. …

and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the “Portrait”, I should have addressed you “Cher Maitre”.

Now what would he want to write for the stage for

?????

Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once

A. a stage play
B. not common, not a botch.

There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.
When we feel we unite. [1]

In the contemporary American drama, it seems that this union is by far the driving force. Unfortunately, it leads to the death of the individual mind, at least in the theatre.

Footnotes
  1. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967, p. 57. [↩]

Eugene O’Neill: The Emperor Jones (1920)

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Charles Gilpin in the Provincetown Playhouse production of The Emperor Jones.

Charles Gilpin in the Provincetown Playhouse production of The Emperor Jones.

Text: Eugene O’Neill, Early Plays, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards; New York: Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 265-292.

Race, power, greed, and empire are the central themes of Eugene O’Neill’s first great Expressionist play and perhaps the first great American play The Emperor Jones (O’Neill characterized it as a tragedy), which premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse under the direction of George Cram Cook on November 1, 1920, with Charles Gilpin in the lead role. A month later the production headed north to Broadway, where it found a home at the Selwyn and Princess Theatres.

Whether or not one agrees with Travis Bogard’s assessment of The Emperor Jones that “Not only the literate American drama, but the American theatre came of age with this play,” it suggested the thematic contours of a native American drama which remain with us today. The play was a landmark in several other ways as well, not least in its featuring a person of color in a lead role in a serious American play on Broadway for the first time. As its themes suggest, this may have been the first explicitly political American play (“The action of the play takes place on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines,” O’Neill writes in a headnote), but its expressionist mode permits it to seek the universal in the local, the metaphysical in the real. Its aesthetic and political radicalism has guaranteed its continuing relevance; it is still frequently revived.

Brutus Jones is a former Pullman Porter who, after a murder and a prison escape, has lucked his way into the leadership of a small West Indian island; he then, with the help of a Cockney trader, seeks to plunder the island and its inhabitants for all they’re worth. “Ain’t I the Emperor? De laws don’t go for him,” he tells Smithers in the play’s first scene:

Dere’s little stealin’ like you does, and dere’s big stealin’ like I does. For de little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks. If day’s one thing I learns in ten years on the Pullman ca’s listenin’ to de white quality talk, it’s dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it I winds up Emperor in two years.

As Jones lucks into his position, America has lucked into its position as a colonialist empire-builder; and like America, Jones has developed a sense of immunity from harm. As he seeks to escape from the island’s rebel forces, he plunges deep into a forest that separates him from a French gunboat on the island’s coastline. There he experiences a Conradian journey into a heart of human darkness; progressing through the forest, he regresses through his personal and racial history, through the murders he committed through the experience of slavery through the journey in a slaveship from Africa to America and finally to the nameless metaphysical fear that haunts the human race. By the end of the play, he has come full circle — when the rebels search for him, they find him not far from where he’d entered the forest the night before.

This is certainly among the most abstract and theatrical of O’Neill’s plays, and among the least literary: scenography, costume, music, and dumbshow bear just as heavy a narrative and expressive burden as the language (in his path through the forest, Jones gradually loses his ceremonial, ostentatious uniform — the symbol of his power and pride — as he progresses through the past, for example). But in marrying an expressionist dramaturgy which seeks universals in the particular case to the American political and social issue of race, O’Neill tempted and arguably succumbed to a form of condescending racial essentialism not unlike the risks that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin invited. “To be mounted today,” Jeffrey Richards writes, “the play would … need to be staged in such a way that audiences did not interpret Jones’s behavior as racially essentialist.” He continues:

This could be done by stressing the reverse history of Africans in America that the middle scenes provide. Brutus Jones envisions not only his own violent history but the history of violence against his ancestors. In those scenes, O’Neill shows awareness that Jones’s behavior is as much culturally conditioned as it is the product of some atavistic yearning for or fear of the jungle. … Obviously informed by Jung’s concept of racial memory, Emperor Jones both reaches for a new expression of psychological torment and exploits comfortable (to whites) if demeaning (to blacks) stereotypes of the theater. As a play, it brings new resonances to the theater, but all too painfully carries in its belly the carcass of a discarded and hurtful concept of race. (xxxix)

Indeed, Charles Gilpin, who created the role of Brutus Jones in the first production, recognized the smell of this carcass. When he began to object to the depiction of black Americans in the play and especially the use of the epithet “nigger,” O’Neill had him replaced with Paul Robeson, with whom the role has been identified since.

The Emperor Jones has continued to stimulate debate about racial stereotyping in American theatre practice even as it has demonstrated its enduring relevance as the American empire itself decays, not least in Elizabeth LeCompte’s controversial Wooster Group production which starred Kate Valk (certainly one of the most memorable and accomplished Brutus Joneses of recent years). But America is engaged itself in a continuing journey to a heart of darkness which includes its own Civil War, its expansionist and mercantile ambitions of the early 20th century, Vietnam, Iraq and the Middle East; in the post-9/11 era, O’Neill’s plays retain their power as uniquely American dramatic expressions more than those of any other American playwright, even a hundred years after their premieres.

An online version of the text of The Emperor Jones can be found here, and other material of interest can be found here. For more on O’Neill’s position as an American political tragedian, read John Patrick Diggins’ fine Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy. I wrote about O’Neill’s first tentative attempts at an expressionist form in Beyond the Horizon here.

Letters, he sent letters

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A 1925 letter from Eugene O'Neill to his literary agent, Richard J. Madden.

A 1925 letter from Eugene O'Neill to his literary agent, Richard J. Madden.

While the biographies by the Gelbs and Louis Sheaffer are standard references in regard to the dramatist, I am spending some time of late paging through Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer’s edition of the Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, some of which may come as a surprise to those familiar with the picture of O’Neill in those biographies or in the otherwise informative Ric Burns PBS documentary of 2006. Instead of the brooding, taciturn poet, O’Neill is an often cheerful, garrulous figure, complaining about his taxes and his children (expressing pride in the latter too), joking, reminiscing, and plotting his next career moves aloud as craftsman and artist; one letter expresses his delight at the idea of being parodied by radio comedian Jack Benny. And because O’Neill wrote very little for publication about his own work, it is in these letters that he has the most to say about drama and the theatre as he approached it. In one of his more extended comments about tragedy, he wrote on 19 June 1931:

As for Aristotle’s “purging,” I think it is time we purged his purging out of modern criticism, candidly speaking! What modern audience was ever purged by pity and terror by witnessing a Greek tragedy or what modern mind by reading one? It can’t be done! We are too far away, we are in a world of different values! As [Oswald] Spengler points out, their art had an entirely different life-impulse and life-belief than ours. We can admire while we pretend to understand — but our understanding is always a pretense! And Greek criticism is as remote from us as the art it criticizes. What we need is a definition of Modern and not Classical Tragedy by which to guide our judgments. If we had Gods or a God, if we had a Faith, if we had some healing subterfuge by which to conquer Death, then the Aristotelian criterion might apply in part to our Tragedy. But our tragedy is just that we have only ourselves, that there is nothing to be purged into except a belief in the guts of man, good or evil, who faces unflinchingly the black mystery of his own soul! [1]

Brooks Atkinson.

Brooks Atkinson.

The recipient of this letter was New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson — which will likely make the Village Voice‘s Alexis Soloski cringe. Not only did O’Neill maintain friendships with several critics of the period, including Atkinson and George Jean Nathan, he went much farther than that, soliciting advice from these critics about his new plays before they were even finished, let alone before they went into rehearsal. Two months later, O’Neill responded to Atkinson’s extended criticisms of Mourning Becomes Electra, the manuscript of which he had submitted to Atkinson for his thoughts:

And criticism which might open one’s eyes to muzzy spots and be of real service never comes until after the opening when, for better or worse, it’s all over. That’s one of many reasons why I’m always glad to have any critic (whose opinions I respect, and whose right to criticize the drama I admit) read my scripts before the openings. Unfortunately producers violently object to this. They want a surprise value at all costs. Also, between us, they know their acting and directing usually are judged better if the critic knows nothing of the play they are supposed (in most cases so mistakenly!) to interpret! [2]

For the current New York Times‘ first-stringer’s response to early-period O’Neill, click here and scroll down.

Of course, O’Neill was an exceptional dramatist, and Atkinson an exceptional critic. But the theatre, drama, and criticism evolve and change not because of the common run of dramatists and critics, but because of these exceptions.

Footnotes
  1. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, p. 390. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 392. Emphasis O’Neill’s. [↩]

Beyond the Horizon and the struggle towards Expressionism

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Liz White in the 2010 National Theatre production of Beyond the Horizon.

Liz White in the 2010 National Theatre production of Beyond the Horizon.

Written 1918; first produced 3 February 1920 at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway; closed May 1920 after 111 performances. Directed by Homer Saint-Gaudens; produced by John D. Williams. With Richard Bennett (Robert Mayo), Robert Kelly (Andrew Mayo), Elsie Rizer (Ruth Atkins), and more; full cast here. Text: Eugene O’Neill, Early Plays, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards; New York: Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 123-194. Online text here.

The birth of the modern American stage might be dated to 3 February 1920 [1], as the birth of the modern British stage has been dated to 8 May 1956, when Look Back in Anger debuted at the Royal Court. A mythology has grown up around this latter event, a mythology well deconstructed by Dan Rebellato, but none around the Broadway premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s first major full-length play, Beyond the Horizon. Perhaps it should (if only to be easily deconstructed; the long gestation period before birth can’t be ignored). Beyond the Horizon‘s virtues, whatever its failures as we may identify them nearly a century later, laid the groundwork for a native tragedy most uniquely composed of the characteristics of the American experience.

Alexander Woollcott remarked on these characteristics in his New York Times review of the play, which appeared on 8 February (the review also contains a good precis of the plot, which I won’t repeat here). The play’s central dynamic is the struggle between domestication and the frontier, and the play’s two brothers yearning for each. Desire rewarded and thwarted upends these yearnings; Robert, the younger brother with a taste for exploration “beyond the horizon” is stayed on the eve of an overseas journey when Ruth declares her love for him; thwarted, Andrew, a more business-minded, practical, and earthbound man, decides to take Robert’s place on the journey in an attempt to assuage his disappointment.

This is the stuff of the melodramatic American theatre in which O’Neill spent his early years, but only just. The hyperbole of dialogue in the melodramatic/realistic model is uncoupled from deus-ex-mechanical plot devices like letters, landlords, or last-minute rescues; the hyperbole is directed inward, to the character, rather than outward, to the story. The result is that the drama approaches Expressionistic treatments of broader tragic themes like desire and fate — and, in America, land, money, and family.

How we receive O’Neill’s early and mid period plays depends a great deal upon how we read them. The published texts as O’Neill revised them through rehearsal and after production were explicitly prepared as reading, not acting, editions — like Ibsen and Shaw before him, he knew the audience for this drama was sitting in the comfortable armchair of the study, not the constraining seat of the theatre. The unfortunate effect in the theatre of this kind of writing was to invite a kind of Belasco-esque, detailed realism and naturalism that conflicted with the heightened lyricism of the dialogue. Existing photographs of the 1920 production reveal a crabbed detail to every nook and cranny of the stage to establish a naturalistic setting — and because of the time-consuming and complex scene changes in each of the three acts of the play, from exterior to interior and back again, the original production of the play lasted a punishing three-and-a-half hours, long even for the time.

None of this should detract us from the very real power and very real tragedy of Beyond the Horizon, even now. However grim, however death-haunted the play, it continues to reveal a kind of pain and struggle of the human spirit which will somehow always remain contemporary. The declining fortunes of the individuals are sometimes delayed, but never reversed, and the greatest loss the characters of the play suffer, that of a two-year-old girl who possesses the potential for a future of happiness, is heart-breaking. But instead of the wailing and gnashing of teeth this might elicit in traditional melodramatic theatre, it leads to a flattening of affect in the characters; color drains from both the dramatis personae and the language they speak in the wake of the death. The resignation that concludes the play is earned, not imposed.

O’Neill believed that a tragedy of the American stage could not share in the same theological or political context as that of the Greek tragedy he admired — no gods driving and judging the fate of men, the chorus useless to provide meaningful significances or to proffer advice. With the next 14 years of his career, O’Neill would continue to abandon the naturalistic and dialect-strewn structure and dialogue of his early plays to explore an experimental American Expressionist tragedy [2] — a period of exploration that would be cut short with the re-emergence of a domesticated, realistic melodrama in the plays of the Group Theatre and its flagship dramatist Clifford Odets, who for this reason may have more claim than O’Neill to influencing the drama that came after. When O’Neill emerged on the other side of the Second World War, it would be with a series of realistic plays touched with the lessons of this Expressionist journey. And he remains, like Shakespeare, sui generis.

There have been two major revivals of Beyond the Horizon in recent years: the first, in 2010 at London’s National Theatre, met with much more critical success than the second, earlier this year at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre. “What makes the play so impressive is the way all three characters are victims of the lies and self-deceptions that stalked O’Neill characters all his working life. [Laurie] Sansom’s production …  has a monumental, Hardyesque sense of fate. … This is a raw tragedy about dreams and delusions that helped shape American drama,” Michael Billington wrote in his positive review of the first production. Ben Brantley of the New York Times was less impressed by the second: “Sometimes you have to squint to detect prophetic flickers of genius in the early works of great artists. In the case of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon … you have to squint hard enough to develop a new set of crow’s feet.” Perhaps Brantley’s review is so dismissive of both the production and the play because of an earlier encounter with it. Indulging in Times‘ reviewers’ license to make their reviews more about themselves than about the works they consider — it certainly saves the time and work of reading and research — Brantley writes, “Horizon was the first play by O’Neill I ever read, at 9 or 10, and as a black-and-white introduction to a dramatist’s worldview it’s not inappropriate reading for preadolescents.” I really can’t resist the opportunity to express my own delighted wonder at Brantley’s exquisite, mature, and insightful response, inflected by his own personal experience, to the play when he was in the third or fourth grade at elementary school. Most of us were still busy putting tacks on teacher’s chair and waiting for our secondary sexual characteristics to develop. But then, perhaps that’s what stern stuff today’s New York Times critics are made of. Perhaps he should have started with The Iceman Cometh instead.

A Eugene O’Neill Web site has links to audio recordings of radio productions of Beyond the Horizon, from back in the day when radio did such things. Perhaps a good place to begin is this 1937 adaptation for NBC, which starred Helen Hayes.

Footnotes
  1. There is some controversy about this date, but Wainscott seems to have confirmed it through records of the period; see Wainscott p. 9-10. [↩]
  2. Here I highly recommend Ronald H. Wainscott’s Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934, a fine survey of the dramaturgy and scenography of O’Neill’s plays during these years; it was published by Yale University Press in 1988. [↩]

From the archives: The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill

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Eugene O'Neill in rehearsals for the Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, 1946

The salesman has been a central character of post-war American drama from Death of a Salesman to Glengarry Glen Ross. He has been treated somewhat impertinently, of course: deluded and destined for failure, but somehow emblematic of the Protestant ethic that emerged from the early America of the 17th and 18th centuries. As an audience, we may think he is crass; at the same time the ideology of the salesman has somehow managed to affect all of us. We are all salesmen now, of our work or of our selves — Twitter and Facebook are the new marketplaces for our experience, it is where we wish to be well-liked; Facebook even has a button for it. It is this, perhaps, that is the reason for the frequent revivals of plays about salesmen over the past decade or so.

I doubt that even a tired salesman like Willy Loman could scrape together the $499.00 that it cost to see the play during its last weeks — that’s a cool thousand bucks for a night on the town with Linda (or The Woman). Make of that what you will: that the contemporary salesman on the skids would be most unlikely to have the chance to recognize himself and realize the illusions by which he has lived in a burst of theatrical epiphany, for he couldn’t afford the seat. Another salesman on the skids, Hickey, is still trodding the boards at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, however: Robert Falls’ production of The Iceman Cometh continues its run through 17 June, with a cast that includes Nathan Lane as Hickey and Brian Dennehy as Larry Slade. The run, according to the Web page for the production, is entirely sold out and unlikely to be extended, but with those reviews can a new Broadway visit be in the offing? The last revival of this on Broadway was only 13 years ago; that same year, 1999, saw the last Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, which was coincidentally directed by the same Robert Falls.

I wrote about The Iceman Cometh on 20 September 2010; that post is below.

The Iceman Cometh. A play in four acts by Eugene O’Neill. New York premiere: Martin Beck Theatre, 9 October 1946. Production and lighting design by Robert Edmond Jones; produced by The Theatre Guild; directed by Eddie Dowling. With James Barton (Hickey), Carl Benton Reid (Larry Slade), Dudley Digges (Harry Hope), Paul Crabtree (Don Parritt), E.G. Marshall (Willie Oban), Jeanne Cagney (Marcie), Leo Chalzel (Hugo Kalmar) and others. Closed 15 March 1947 (136 performances). Text: The Iceman Cometh, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. With an introduction by Harold Bloom.

If you were to ply me with drinks at a cocktail party (which doesn’t happen often enough, by the way) and ask for my nominee for the greatest American play of the twentieth century, my answer would be The Iceman Cometh, without hesitation. One of O’Neill’s two great masterworks of the postwar period, O’Neill completed the play in 1939 then withheld it from production for the duration of World War II. “A New York audience could neither see nor hear its meaning,” he wrote to Lawrence Langer. “The pity and tragedy of defensive pipe dreams would be deemed downright unpatriotic. … But after the war is over, I am afraid … that American audiences will understand a lot of The Iceman Cometh only too well.” [1] O’Neill was wrong about this; the play lasted a scant six months on Broadway, its power and brilliance recognized only with the 1956 revival of the play off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square theatre, directed by Jose Quintero and featuring Jason Robards as Hickey (Robards’ performance as Hickey in the 1985 Broadway revival of the play, also directed by Quintero, is one of the most indelible memories of my entire theatregoing experience). And it is the product, most certainly, of a tragic, and not a comic, consciousness.

O’Neill’s consideration that the play might be received as “unpatriotic” points to the peculiarly American nature of its theme — the “pipe-dream” as the dream of America, new beginnings and, once again, a prelapsarian experience that would leave European history behind. I use the word “theme” deliberately, for the play’s structure itself doesn’t resemble the three-act structure of Ibsen or the five-act structure of Shakespeare but rather the four-movement structure of a symphony, containing a theme and its variations more important than a storyline. O’Neill’s reputation as a repetitious writer may have some of its ground in a consideration of the play’s four-hour length, but it was not a failing of O’Neill’s work as much as a well-considered compositional approach. Bogard also cites a moment during rehearsals for the play when producer Lawrence Langer noted that one point had been made eighteen times — “O’Neill told him ‘in a particularly quiet voice, “I intended it to be repeated eighteen times!”‘”

The musical structure is additionally revealed in the first act of the play, by far the longest of the four at 81 pages in the published text. The fifteen denizens of Harry Hope’s backroom (no doubling possible here, either), significantly set in 1912, just before the First World War, engage in a lengthy polyphonic fugue of their dreams and aspirations, all of which they will fulfill “tomorrow”; it is a suite of voices of varying tone and note. And it is a polyglot tongue with which the play speaks, reflecting also the mass immigration to America at the turn of the century; Dutch, Irish, British; a Harvard-educated law student next to a cop and a carnival barker; Hugo Kalmar, an anarchist revolutionary who has spent ten years in prison and upon his release has been easily assimilated into the America which Harry Hope’s back room signifies;  and the black Joe Mott. [2] There are three women as well, generating an aural soundscape of urban America at the time.

At the end of the act the salesman Hickey arrives for his annual bender on the occasion of barowner Harry Hope’s 60th birthday, but he arrives this time selling something to the denizens of the bar — a release from illusion and pipe-dreams, urging them to take action to make these dreams true. It is, as it transpires, something of a trick; Hickey knows that none will be able to do so, but convinces them to make the effort in a project to bring “truth.” In attempting to reveal the lies beneath human hope, he reveals also the nothingness that lies beneath both eros and death.

The title of the play, The Iceman Cometh, is a sickly double-entendre marrying death and orgasm; while death is the iceman, so is Hickey, for even the peace to be found in death is an illusion. Perhaps its key can be found in the realization achieved by Larry Slade, an ex-anarchist who believes he has resigned himself to the failures of the human spirit, describing himself as a “grandstander,” waiting for the peace of death. But even this is a lie, in the words of the play a “pipe-dream”:

LARRY (With increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey): I’m afraid to live, am I? — and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won’t see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it’s only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! … You think you’ll make me admit that to myself?
HICKEY (Chuckling): But you just did admit it, didn’t you? (168)

Hickey has turned his merciless project onto himself already, having killed his wife Evelyn in an effort to relieve himself of the guilt of being human, a guilt which Evelyn was willing to forgive; but it is something in the human spirit, some mysterious force which hovers over all the characters of the play, which turns eros to violence. The second act of the play is perhaps one of the most telling, as Hickey’s admittedly successful attempt to tear the illusions from each of the characters leads to the physical violence — racial, political, sexual — among those who peaceably enjoyed each other’s company, drunk as they were, in the hours before Hickey’s arrival.

But death, whether it comes to Evelyn through murder or Don Parritt through suicide in the last moments of the play, does not bring peace. This truth confuses Hickey as he surveys the broken human community he has created; but he has sold this truth. In Act Four, which features Hickey’s tortured 40-minute monologue describing his murder of Evelyn, the drunks of Harry Hope’s bar can’t even find peace in the booze, which has “lost its kick.” It is only with Hickey’s departure that it regains its effect.

If Don Parritt is the Judas figure of the play, having ratted out his anarchist mother out of both hatred and greed (and Larry Slade just might be his father), Hickey is its corrupt Christ, bringing a spiritual truth which he himself may not fully understand. What is left is the human figure of Larry Slade, and the human community. It is no surprise that the final curtain falls on a raucous cacaphony of popular song, drinking and laughter:

([Hope] starts the chorus of “She’s the Sunshine of Paradise Alley,” and instantly they all burst into song. But not the same song. Each starts the chorus of his or her choice. Jimmy Tomorrow’s is “A Wee Dock and Doris”; Ed Mosher’s, “Break the News to Mother”; Willie Oban’s, the Sailor Lad ditty he sang in Act One; General Wetjoen’s “Waiting at the Church”; McGloin’s, “Tammany”; Captain Lewis’s, “The Old Kent Road”; Joe’s, “All I Got Was Sympathy” [and on for a bit] … while Hugo jumps to his feet and, pounding on the table with his fist, bellows in his guttural basso the French Revolutionary “Carmagnole.” A weird cacophony results from this mixture and they stop singing to roar with laughter. All but Hugo, who keeps on with drunken fervor.)
HUGO:
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son! Vive le son!
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son des canons!
(They all turn on him and howl him down with amused derision. He stops singing to denounce them in his most fiery style.)
Capitalist svine! Stupid bourgeois monkeys!
(He declaims.)
“The days grow hot, O Babylon!”
(They all take it up and shout in enthusiastic jeering chorus.)
“‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!”
(They pound their glasses on the table, roaring with laughter, and Hugo giggles with them. In his chair by the window, Larry stares in front of him, oblivious to their racket. Curtain.) (218-219)

Metatheatrically, the “dirty black curtain which separates [the back room] from the bar” at upstage right (7) is a mirror of the proscenium curtain that separates The Iceman Cometh from its audience, and indeed the curtain falls. In these final moments, O’Neill masterfully presents a remarkable picture of America (this is Walt Whitman’s America singing, its democracy to be found in the individual songs each singer chooses to bawl), drawing the audience too into that back room and rendering them similarly denizens of illusion. Even the ideals of Hugo’s revolutionary political fervor are rendered as just one additional instance of the noise of America, a putatively joyful noise which isolates those who have learned the truth, who have pierced through the illusion to see the yawning abyss beneath it; once truly seen and recognized in the self, it is impossible to turn away again and lose oneself in that community, as Larry Slade knows. (O’Neill, interestingly, was also one of America’s few dramatists with a firm grounding in philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; as Harold Bloom notes in his foreword to the Yale University Press edition: “We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality. … Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion.” [x]) America — and the newly Americanized world — have not become less cacophanous since 1946; over sixty years later, with the Internet, mass media and other devices, it may be more cacophanous than ever, rendering The Iceman Cometh perhaps the greatest American play of the 21st century as well. O’Neill’s work is a deeply moving, shockingly sublime and disconcerting (in the best sense of the word) experience on the page or on the stage; anyone who does not know it does not know the American theatre, what it has been, is, and could be, for better or worse. It is, with the novels of Herman Melville, the canvases of Mark Rothko and the music of Morton Feldman, among the most majestic expressions of the tragedy that lies at the heart of the American experience.

Via YouTube, two Hickeys: first, Al Pacino reads from the play in this excerpt from Ric Burns’ 2006 PBS documentary on O’Neill:

And Jason Robards as Hickey in an excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s 1960 television production of the play — and your eyes do not deceive you; that’s a very young Robert Redford as Don Parritt:

Footnotes
  1. Cited in Travis Bogard’s notes on the play in Contour in Time, available online here. [↩]
  2. It is little noted just how O’Neill’s extraordinary and subtle sense of the black experience in America makes its way into his plays; the romance between a white woman and a black man in his 1924 All God’s Chillun Got Wings brought the play to the attention of the New York mayor’s office. [↩]