So.... I saw The Iceman Cometh, one of the great plays of our time, at BAM last night. I'm still scratching my head figuratively. Eugene O'Neill wrote grand, magnificent tragedies. For a play to be a tragedy it is necessary to have at its core a tragic hero. O'Neill's heroes are huge and have great effect and so their falls are devastating, heart-rending and soul-emptying.
I'm too young to have seen Jason Robards as Hickey in the original 1956 Circle in the Square production but I did find a couple of videos on YouTube. While I was there I checked out the Hickeys of Lee Marvin and Kevin Spacey as well. They all had the appearance of being virile and physically towering men (yes, somehow, even Spacey). Nathan Lane does not have the stature, the grandeur if you will, for the role. He bursts onstage in all his vaudevillian splendor. He's a Looney Toon animation, the hawker of sideshows at Coney Island, the best friend but not the leading man. It's impossible to see why the drunks in the Last Chance Saloon wait eagerly for his return every year, how he is able to bend them to his will or to understand the long-suffering love his wife Evelyn had for him. And so his fall is not from a great height but a stumble off a footstool.
The young anarchist on the run and fighting with his internal demons, Don Parritt, has been portrayed by the likes of Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges. Why choose an actor of diminutive stature and a ferrety look, Patrick Andrews, for this production? Parritt is not the tragic hero of the play but he is conflicted and in the context of the play his life should mean more to us than it does here. He comes to Larry, played here by Brian Dennehy with great quiet stoicism, looking for safe harbour or, at the very least, an answer to the why of his very existence. This Parritt we want to kick to the curb.
Dennehy is a large lumbering block of a man. He seems rooted to his seat for much of the play like the stump of an enormous tree. He says little but is the conscience of the play. It is he who first voices O'Neill's thematic "pipe dreams." I would have liked to see him bring more humanity to the role but the death mask that is his face in the final moments of the play is a crushing sight to behold.
Overall, I found Robert Fall's directiom to be static and flat. The other denizens of the bar are caricatures, not living, breathing human beings, even the great John Douglas Thompson as Joe. O'Neill wrote types but the material is there to make them real. I wanted to feel that I was really there, in this bar with people who had real lives before this moment and would continue to have them after even if their lives were only at the bottom of a shot glass. Instead I felt like I was watching a sit-com. Check out the YouTube videos if you want to see how it can be done.
