Davies’s blistering and beautifully shaped staging compares favorably with the legendary 1956 production that re-established the primacy of O’Neill and made actor Jason Robards and director Jose Quintero the playwright’s foremost interpreters. O’Neill is a theatrical Lazarus who keeps coming back from the grave assigned to him by intellectual and Europhile critics who complain that he’s not Ibsen or Chekhov. O’Neill’s greatness is specifically American; it needs to be seen in the matrix of a young culture with its own essences and energies.
Davies has found the variety of rhythm and pattern in this masterpiece by a playwright so often accused of writing with 10 thumbs and speaking with a flannel mouth. (Mary McCarthy cracked that “Iceman” was like a Platonic dialogue in the style of “Casey at the Bat.”) Davies has seen that the essence of the play is a quite Shakespearean one, a whirligig of tragedy and comedy. The sodden denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon, stupefied on nickel whisky, await the appearance of their old pal Hickey the salesman, who will regale them with free booze and bawdy barroom stories like tales of his wife’s infidelity with the iceman. But it’s a new Hickey who whirls in, determined not to entertain them but to save them from their “pipe dreams.”
This Hickey is an unholy roller, a would-be savior who horrifies the hopeless Hopesters with his evangelical zeal. He lashes them to at last act out their fantasies–that Harry will venture forth from the saloon he hasn’t left since his wife died 20 years ago, that the corrupt cop will regain his job, that the bartender will admit he’s a pimp and his girls that they’re whores, that the black gambler, the journalist, the anarchists, will all leave their liquored limbo and re-enter life. Hickey knows that they will all fail, and will therefore drop their pipe dreams and accept themselves as the all-too-human wrecks they are. But it’s Hickey who also fails, who turns out to be not the savior but the true Iceman, Death.
Never have these four and a half hours in hell raced by with such Einsteinish speed. “Get it over with, ya long-winded bastard,” yells Harry at Hickey–O’Neill’s joke at his own prolixity. Spacey turns this prolixity into the hysteria of self-revelation. His last-act jeremiad is a near-half-hour burst of anguished eloquence in which the actor makes you hear the chilling-yet-thrilling music of ultimate despair. The entire cast of 19 is a marvel of drunken harmony; Tim Pigott-Smith’s performance as Larry the ravaged revolutionary matches Spacey’s in its tragic force. O’Neill possessed the most obvious faults in theater history. His great virtues, more important, spring to life in this superb and transporting production.
Delving Into the Inner Spacey
Thirty-nine-year-old Kevin Spacey is that rarity, a character actor who’s a true star. Winner of an Oscar for “The Usual Suspects” (1996) and a Tony for “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), he moves easily between movies and theater. Reticent about his private passions, he’s eloquent about his public passion–the art and ethos of acting.
Why he doesn’t get star billing. London producers wanted to put my name above the title. I said that’s wrong. Here I had walls knocked down so we wouldn’t have separate dressing rooms.
Why the salesman is an American icon. The preacher, the politician, the warrior–they’re selling this faith, this policy, this vacuum cleaner. O’Neill is asking, what the hell are we really trying to sell?
How he got his start. I was working in Joe Papp’s stockroom. Joe fired me. I thought, what have I done? He said, you should be acting. Four months later he was in the audience of my first Broadway play.
The appeal of O’Neill. No matter how technologically brilliant we become, if we don’t have empathy, love, compassion and humor we are lost. I think people coming to this play see something they recognize either in themselves or someone they know. It’s just the simple human connection.
