The Iceman Cometh

by Eugene O'Neill, Harold Bloom (Foreword)

Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a modest run in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill’s dark play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained in stature. Kevin Spacey and James Earl Jones have played Hickey. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Fiction, Theatre, American, Literature

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: get real. It's a play.

The Publisher Says: Eugene O’Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O’Neill’s darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, <>The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

My Review: Plays, blech.

This cheery little bagatelle expresses beautifully (as in, with lovely, sonorous sentences) the pointlessness, uselessness, and worthlessness of modern life. Humans are a scourge upon the earth, venal and vicious and horrifyingly stupid, and should all drink themselves to death as rapidly as possible. Redemption is futile. Look where it got whatsisname, the soberest one.

All I can say is that it's a damn good thing that I've got a case of cheap scotch in the liquor cabinet. I ain't comin' up for air until my "check liver" light comes on.

[Sketchbook · Rating 1 out of 5]

"O'Neill uses the phrase the big sleep throughout his play as a synonym for death," advises Ray Chandler, "apparently in the belief that it's an accepted underworld expression. If so, I'd like to see whence it comes, because I invented the expression. I never saw the phrase in print before I used it. The tenor of his writing here shows that he knows very little about the subject."

The playwright also bops us over the head with the phrase "pipe dreams." It takes him over four hours to say life is only bearable if we have fantasies and ignore the truth. ~ Really? ~ During the psychoanalytic '20s, O'Neill dragged the American theatre into modernity with plays about sex, repression, guilt and mystic wonders. He couldn't "write," but, at his best, he had a keen feeling for stage showmanship.

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 5 out of 5]

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?

You know those tragedies where everything is great and than everyone dies? How about when they don't all die but end up half-insane and half are dead? Oh, or how about when the protagonist dies upholding some virtue? This is not it.

This play is unique in tragic plays because the lives of the major characters are already ruined to start; during the play some get better, some get worse, for the most part, though, everything stays the same. That's what makes this one of the most powerful tragedies ever written. It is not a noble virtue or innocent life, though, that is being sacrificed, it is people's dreams and aspirations. The realism that is portrayed in this play should shake you to the bone. These people are condemned(alcoholics) and in the underworld(bar) and as tragedy dictates cannot be redeemed. They all make some very powerful insights in their ramblings (special mention goes to Joe) but ultimately they do nothing to escape there lots and, frankly they don't want to.

The "dark messiah" of this piece thinks he can move them on, and his dynamic ways bring a powerful contrast to everybody else but, his method and reasoning in-the-end turns out to codify that even he can't deny that like the others there is no hope of redemption and his own twisted logic serves to undo him (and another). If one sees or reads this play just take in mind that it is cynicism that generates all the tragedy here and any optimism or hope WILL NOT BE TOLERATED (unless your "Yellow" like Larry).

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

"To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything." -Larry, The Iceman Cometh Act One.

The first time I picked this play up, I had a feeling I was going to really enjoy it. Well, "enjoy" is probably the wrong word to use, even as I am a now twice-read, twice-seen, fan of this Eugene O'Neill play. Other words like "appreciate" and "identify with" come to mind. It's a hard play to digest.

Americans occasionally give great playwrights permission to be longwinded. The most recent example I can think of is Tony Kushner with Angels in America . As with that two part epic, Eugene O'Neill has provided us with a brilliant exploration of angst and regret, American style. This play is brimming with brilliant philosophy, but also painful applications of its misuse by washed-up characters we hope/assume we'll never become.

There are two great video productions of this play available. I recommend watching it and then reading it to get the greatest impact. I can't imagine how draining it was for O'Neill to write this, but I'm grateful he didn't spare me.

[Carac Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy going to the theater. I always have. But unless you live in New York or Toronto or Los Angeles and have unlimited money and endless free evenings you just can't see that many of the great plays in a lifetime. This simple fact is why I started reading plays and why I know that plays are meant to be read as well as performed.

No American drama supports this assertion more than "The Iceman Cometh". It has a huge cast and goes on for hours and hours. It has had some memorable productions, most recently with Kevin Spacey, but it is usually described as "unproducable". Which is why you should read it.

"Long Day's Journey into Night" is O'Neill's best play but "The Iceman Cometh" is his greatest achievement. It is a sprawling masterpiece, a work of genius.

It takes place in a bar filled with alcoholic losers. Each one has a cherished dream of what they wanted to do with their life and an excuse as to why they failed. The king of the losers is Harry Hope. They are all awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a traveling businessmen who has made a habit of stopping in at the bar for a party in which he buys drinks and tells tales and jokes.

Hickey shows up having had an epiphany. He doesn't want to lament life's passing anymore. He wants to go out there and live. His excitement gets all the drunks planning their escape from the purgatory of booze and hangovers. They're happy and hopeful. And to celebrate they drink to the future!

The next day this is all revealed to have been just part of the regular cycle of booze and hangovers. No one is really going to change their life.

Depressing and real, tragic and true.

Carac

[Brian Yahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

At its core - The Iceman Cometh is about a group of people who have big dreams, but make no effort to realize them. In fact, most of them don't even want their dreams - they just need a lie to keep them going.

This play reminded me a lot of Of Mice and Men - in the way George and Lenny have their dream to live on a farm together in retirement. In this story, Chuck and Cora are a couple who stick together but aren't in love - and they, too, always talk about living the dream - a simple life of the farm, together. The other characters tease them incessantly that they aren't the country type, couldn't make it one night on a farm til the crickets drove 'em looney.

There's a character, Jimmy Tomorrow, who everyday says he'll get his old job back as a journalist for the newspaper - always tomorrow...

And then there's Harry Hope - who enables all these procrastinating bar-flys by providing them with room and board and lots of liquor in dingy saloon. He hasn't stepped foot out of his bar in years - since his wife died. He keeps using this as an excuse, but every day he says he's finally going to leave the bar, and this time he really means it - yes siree! Of course he never does...

The whole group drink together all day everyday - and all they ever talk about is the one time a year Hickey comes into the bar. He's a larger-than-life type of character that really gets a party going.

But this time, when he shows up - he's changed. He's given up his drunken ways. He's a go-getter now. He doesn't put things off anymore, make any excuses. Not after his wife died. No, he's found the light, and he's there to show everyone else the way, too - to get them to go after their dreams.

But, really, he makes everyone realize that their dreams are a big lie. And Hickey himself is the biggest liar of them all. As the truth comes out of these characters, you learn the tragedy of lying to yourself and living off fake dreams.

This is the type of story that really makes you think about your life and learn things about yourself.

And my favorite thing about this story is the character who is always half asleep, randomly waking up to scream lines from a German poem, called The Revolution:

The days grow hot, O Babylon! 'Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!

It's interesting how I fell in love with these lines and this character - even though as I read it, I had no idea what it meant. The character was a failed revolutionary, and the poem he quotes is about how revolution will inevitably triumph - as "History's Iron Law". As he sleeps drunkenly throughout the play, this character is LITERALLY constantly dreaming about his failed revolution sometime succeeding. A pipe dream of his own!

Eugene O'Neill is a master.

[Franky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Welcome to Harry’s bar, filled to the brim with desolate, disillusioned patrons clinging to their pipe dreams, their hopes that tomorrow, after all, will be another day.

The play opens with the patrons sitting around in a drunken stupor. We are introduced to the various types: Rocky, the bartender; Larry Slade, the protagonist who has given up on his pipe dream and awaits his exit from life; Parritt, a rebel anarchist; Willie, a failed law student; Harry Hope, proprietor of the bar; Watjoen and Lewis, enemies on the battle field who are now drinking buddies; Joe, former gambler; Pat, former police man. As these characters dwell on their aspirations and failures, they await the arrival of Hickman (“Hickey”). Hickey, a salesman with a boisterous, lively personality, has a way of boosting the group’s morale with his jokes and manners. However, when Hickey arrives to the saloon, he brings with him a new perspective on life that the regulars can’t make sense of. Hickey, who has sworn off drinking, wants the group to face down the realities of their lives. It gets more complicated as the patrons understand and become more skeptical about Hickey’s newfound outlook.

To put Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh in its proper context is to understand that the author experience hardships and tragedies in his life and tended to “pour his soul” out in his plays. The Iceman Cometh is not only strong in its symbolism, but in its deep pathos about life, one’s struggles to make sense of the world. Some readers see this drama solely as a depressing play about alcoholic-loser types with failed lives, which is a pity, because this is an outlook that sells this powerful drama short.

Sure, it is bleak. It exhibits a certain amount of nihilism being that the characters are happier with illusions than reality, a sort of “ignorance is bliss” mentality. However, O’Neill seems to be inferring that we (the readers) can learn from these very character’s mistakes, and that reality doesn’t have to so false as to resort to drowning ourselves in alcohol or wallowing in self-deprecation for past failures.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugene O'Neill is America's finest playwright. You may argue that Miller or Inge or Capote have this or that or anything else, but no one put everything together in such a classic manner as O’Neill. To read or watch an O’Neill play is properly a life altering experience. Very often, as with the present work, it ought to leave one’s life in shambles, the veritable house of cards you always knew it was but hoped no one else would notice.

The Iceman Cometh is a tragedy, but one in which you find yourself easily engaged from the beginning. One is sucked in to what you feel is a distant scene, far away from one’s own life and then characters begin to appear which gnaw at your conscience: some of them look familiar and it makes you squirm. They don’t look quite the same on the stage or on the page, but some of the things each of them says: it’s like something you heard someone say somewhere, some other place and time.

The play is about dreams and guilt and responsibility. It translates as well today as it did when it was written. If I had never seen a bar, and I haven’t seen one quite like this, I would recognize it in Ancient Greece. Bars are a place for misplaced hopes and dreams and damaged spirits of all kinds. People come to believe and they leave, if lucky, learning how to forget a little piece of reality. As Hickey says, paraphrasing, there’s only so much guilt you can feel and pity you can take before you start blaming someone or something else.

I have always wanted to know where O’Neill ever got the keys that unlocked my soul’s deepest secrets. When you read The Iceman Cometh, you have a pretty good idea of what catharsis means. At the end, you know what’s valuable and what should be cast off in your life… should you have the courage to be able to do so. I am awed only that we can still read it without expiring from our own modern self-imposed toxicity.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished reading this with 2 of my closest friends. The setting was my living room which perhaps felt like the bar in the play, with a few bedrooms upstairs. Oh man, that was so insanely wonderful. Reading out loud and in character is how plays are meant to be read.
On the other note, the play was great. I love dark elements to writing. There was a lot of talk about pipe dreams, which isn't a term I use a lot, I don't even really know what it means. I have come to the conclusion that it is a version of lying to oneself. In this case many of the characters had something they should feel guilty for that caused them to be alcoholics, but they claim there is some other reason that they are in this position. It is a fake story that feeds into them feeling even more guilty. The logic that Hickey uses for why he kills his wife is actually very logical. It makes some assumptions that may not be true, such as his wife not being able to get over him leaving her, but maybe he knows better than we do whether that is true. The fact that it adds in Anarchists and Wobblies from 1912, just enhances the ambiance of the piece.
This play was so gritty and just real. Reminds me of Last Exit to Brooklyn. Loved it!!

[Alex Sarll · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've not sat down to read a play I didn't know in a long time, so maybe that's part of the problem, but this is poor. Perhaps at the time it seemed new and strange - but now it just feels like the grandfather of every clunking moment-of-truth modern play that every dramatist who ever thought Chekhov made it look easy wrote for every actor who wanted a showcase for their mighty skills. If Arthur Miller had a brother who'd had to make every point with a sledgehammer, who had never heard the phrase 'show not tell', then he'd have written this turkey - but even then he probably wouldn't have had quite so many superfluous characters in near-identical roles.

[Debi Cates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely the mindset of alcoholics I've known. Sad.

[Steve]

Failed dreams meet Hope, or so it appears in Mr. O’Neill’s excellent play. Harry Hope’s saloon and rooming house is the setting for a group of social castaways who find temporary inspiration from the exhortations of Theodore Hickman, Hickey, a hardware salesman who finally reveals some unsettling news – so much for that hope.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this play so much as a teenager, and I don't know why. I liked the way Hickey could pass himself off as a regular guy, always smiling and joking, while inside he was crazy with hatred. I think because I had a lot of anger myself I liked the idea that you could be angry and still "get away with it." Of course in the end Hickey falls apart but he's so much more heroic and tragic than a total failure like Willy Loman.

Another thing I really loved about this play was how young Parrit hates his mother and her radical friends so much. Growing up in the Seventies I always felt like Sixties radicals were sneering at me and that it was some kind of personal thing. When I went away to college I noticed how my professors always talked about my generation with disdain. I took it personally and it made me really draw away from trusting the people who were being paid to educate me. I used to sit in the back of the lecture hall and daydream about switching sides, betraying my leftist professors the way Parrit does. Of course Parrit dies at the end but at least he takes his mother down with him and exposes her radical set for the fakes and cowards they really are. There was so much I hated about my professors at Columbia and Parrit really expresses this eloquently when he talks about "tramps and bums and free women" who think they are so much better than anyone else.

What it really comes down to is that O'Neill has written a play where the characters who feel the most don't feel anything but hate. The lesser characters can find refuge in booze and daydreams, but the one undying reality for the characters who look inside themselves is hate. And while I don't think life is really like that, I do believe that people are told that it's wrong to feel certain things. Sometimes the effort to hide emotions we are ashamed of can actually make it harder to put things in perspective and move on. What makes THE ICEMAN COMETH a thrilling play is not the triumph of hate over love but the triumph of truth over illusion. Hickey, Larry, and Parrit all face the truth about themselves. The revelations that get them to that point are fascinating and terrifying, but never just dreary and sad as in the case of Willy Loman.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, this play moves me in so many ways that I really want to give it a 5 star rating, except for the fact that in many cases it is dreadfully, irredeemably overwritten.

I tried to watch the movie which could boast of having Jason Robards and Robert Redford in it, but I got bored to death after the first 45 mins or so. I hate to say it but this one seems to be much much better when read privately rather than performed.

No slight to O'Neill, at least in terms of his writing (it could have been an incredible novella or linked group of short stories, maybe a mid-length novel and been better off) but in terms of play production.....nah. Not this one.

This is one of those books you read and connect deeply with and eventually move on from until you see it somewhere and start thinking about it and realize how you're still there, psychically, even though years have gone past. You know?

Damn. I got to re-read this.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Iceman Cometh is noted for its dark realism; its setting and characters closely
resemble real life. The world of the play is a cruel place. Despair is a constant presence,
love only an illusion, and death something to which one looks forward. Relief comes in
alcohol and pipe dreams—groundless hopes for a future that will never arrive.

The play seems too dark and despairing to bear but stay with it ... It doesn't get any less depressing but there is much interesting philosophy along the journey.

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting play about the necessity of "pipe dreams" (hoping for the impossible) to continue living without falling into despair. The one person who has their pipe dream taken away commits suicide. The scenes are so well set up and the descriptions of how characters talk, it felt like a novel. The characters were excellent, the political themes were good, the major plot reveal at the end was good too. Highly recommend to anyone who enjoys plays.

[Colin Carson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fuck this book.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all in de game. (Cora, Act V)

It's all in the game.

All in the game, yo.

[Amanda Nolan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long, but powerful — an important work that once one digs below the story to the messages. Read ch on psychological insight

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

How jaded must I be? Chronic, neighborhood violence, damn! What kind of civilization cultivates a man that can read The Iceman Cometh and contemptuously think, ‘murder, that’s it; confessed and taken away? Okay...so, 3-stars?’

Use an RSS feed for your local news, watch the impresarios of late night comedy, see the plea deals that defile our legal system—you’ll know common, felony violence perpetrated across class, gender and age for senseless reasons that cheapen lives. It’s from this post-post-industrial 2009 culture that makes The Iceman Cometh an anachronistic 1946 warning full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I casually absorbed the shock that made this a haunting play of self obsession.

Well written—the brogue, the characteristic spiral of clinical alcoholism, the insightful capture of debauched saloon perennials in 1912. But the staging of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece is the only appropriate way, in my mind, to experience the play, not the written word. I’m not an actor—not even a singer—so if you find it hard to translate characters from page to stage, I’d rent the play and observe the genius of actors animating printed word to anatomical characters. This play, full of contorted logic, was made for the stage. You must see the agony, not project the scene direction; you must experience the horror through other characters, not attribute the feeling from back scene narration; you must watch the soliloquy lead to the dénouement; not be interrupted by printed interjections from the side.

This man killed his wife, ostensibly to set her free from having to continue loving the louse he’d become. He exercised increasingly wicked deeds to estrange himself, but she forgave, again and again; she would always forgive. Despite his attempts, he was trapped henceforth by her unconditional love.

The concept of a ‘pipedream’ was the overriding metaphor in the play. All characters had their peculiar pipedreams. For me, the unique angle of this play was not murder (albeit for whatever reason—it just didn’t surprise me); instead it was Hickey’s attempt to intrude on each barfly, break the pipedream, dispel their illusions, and make them see how free they were to change their lives. Aghast! How do you change the lives of chronic bottom-feeders? How do you presume to effect the reconciliation of a man, once productive and important, now surrendered and wasted, to see opportunity in life yet? Hickey’s last effort to free his friends, when he was himself trapped by murder, was the irony that moved me. Even more, that each barfly tried to change but immediately failed, made Hickey’s efforts the ravings of a man truly out of his mind. And yet, the irony greatest of all, was that Hickey's push of altruism resulted in the meaningless, unexpected death of an additional character.

This play was a shock in 1946; today it's merely an open window into man.

***Please VOTE***

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sad saga chronicles a group of drunks who meet up at a local saloon. They are full of big dreams for the future, but anyone who knows them knows that they are all talk and no action. Each man has glossed over the story of his life in his own mind, leaving out the bad bits and chalk any failures up to someone else’s fault or a tragedy that befell him.

The patrons look up to a salesman named Hickman ("Hickey") who stops in when he can. During the first half of the play everyone gathers at the saloon for a birthday party and just waits for Hickey to arrive. When he finally gets there something is different about him and immediately everyone is concerned. He has lost his happy-go-lucky attitude. Hickey forces each of the individuals to reevaluate their lives and ask themselves whether they are truly trying to improve it.

The owner of the saloon, Harry Hope, watches the drama unfolds in his establishment. He is concerned by the direction in which Hickey’s “ideas” are steering everyone. In this world people embrace only the possibility of a better life, they never intend to take the steps that would actually lead to one, but it's that hope that keeps them going.

It’s hard to explain why this was such a powerful story to me. I think part of it is the context in which it was written. It was published in 1940, and written during the Great Depression, a time of disillusionment in America. It captures that feeling of hopelessness in such a palpable way. I could see each of the characters thinking about their “one day” plans and truly believing that those dreams were attainable.

BOTTOM LINE: This play paints a beautiful picture of the crumbling American dream. It asks the question, do people really want to reach their goals or is the fact that they have those dreams enough for them? There’s something to be said for having a distant hope, especially for those living such desperate lives.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the richest plays, symbolically, of modern American theater. But like most if not all O'Neill plays, it is as interesting to read as it is to see on the stage. Lots of other plays of this era that are heavy on symbolism rely on the visual cues of the production to bring the meaning through, and therefore can seem remote and boring when reading them. (Unless you're a director perhaps, and particularly trained to read plays with an inner eye for staging them.) O'Neill really uses theater as a composite art, and he isn't afraid to get a little meta, making all kinds of references and loops and homages, using tropes of Greek theater and quoting the Bible; weaving pieces of Jungian psychology, American popular culture, and ancient myth all at once.

This play is, overall, a bit depressing, and has somewhat of a "what can you do, the world is f*cked" political edge to it - critiquing both the idealism and delusion of socialism and anarchism while at the same time showing them to be the best pathetic hope we have against other more exploitative systems, as most of his plays seem to do. (NB, not necessarily my opinions.) But "The Iceman Cometh" is also funny and intense and a loopy sensory experience. It has a lot of interesting characters whose stories you're genuinely invested in seeing unfold. And I remember I encountered the phrase "pipe-dream" for the first time reading this play.

[Tony Romine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This play concerns a saloon/rooming house and the alcoholics who live there. They sit around, reminiscing about the better days and their big plans to get their lives started, all of them anxiously awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a salesman who comes by once a year to blow a lot of money on them and throw a birthday party for Harry, the owner of the saloon.

It's a great play and one of the best ever written, in my opinion. The setting, dialogue, and characters might seem a bit dated, but the actual substance of the play remains relevant. It's also a bit slow in the beginning setting up the characters and story, but once Hickey shows up it really shines. I highly recommend seeking out the 1959 version with Jason Robards as Hickey, it's hands down some of the best acting you will ever see in your life.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know O'Neill is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American playwrights; and I LOVE Long Day's Journey into Night, however, I absolutely HATED this play. I had no "in" to the play. I didn't like any of the characters, therefore, I didn't care about any of them. Because of this I found it very difficult to read the long, drunken ramblings of each of the characters. I couldn't fathom any point to the play-If there was an over arching theme to it, I missed it, and don't care to find it.

[Illiterate · Rating 5 out of 5]

People drug themselves with self-justifying lies. Can they find peace in truth? No, that too is a pipe dream. Only the lies make life bearable. Pass the bottle.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neil



To my surprise, I have just learned that The Iceman Cometh is appreciated by critics as one of the greatest plays of American Theatre. Not that I did not enjoy it, but had not heard of it, which is not saying all that much and had decided to listen to it, because George Constantin had a role in it.

As part of my reading and listening plan, plays in which our greatest actor had a role are advancing to the top of the list.

He was -and is in recordings- so great, that any material gets other worldly proportions.

The Eugene O’Neill play is excellent, albeit it sounds like a joke, when we look at the characters and the setting:

The characters are:

The owner of a motel and bar, an Italian pimp aka barman, officers who deserted, an African American, a Dutchman and prostitutes…

It is like one of those humorous lines: an Italian walks into a bar.

The main character Hickey has a terrible crime in his past and comes to the bar, after a selling tour, only to torment his pals.

The plot is complex, very interesting and meaningful.

Hickey is placing mirrors in front of this tribe of losers. They drink too much, are involved in crime, hide desertion or/ and fears and anxieties drowned in large quantities of alcohol.

Harry Hope is made unforgettable by a giant actor- George Constantin. Harry keeps saying that he will go for a walk, go out of his saloon, but never makes it.

When Hickey is back from his Long Journey into Night, he claims he is transformed by abstinence and urges the others to face the facts and change.

He insists that Harry goes for a walk to face the world, as soon as the saloon proprietor is out the door, he starts to cringe and comes back shouting – did you that driver…crazy, he should be hanged.

There is some kind of change involving all the misfits: one prostitute wants to get married, the other misfits contemplate different life plans.

Some of these constructions may come true, but there are dramatic events and changes in the perception of Hickey – he appeared as a savior, Messenger even Messiah for a while, only to change his role.

I wonder what the play would look like with my all time favorite in the role of Hickey, which is much more interesting and challenging than Harry’s.

A great play was taken to immense height by a magnificent artist. He is a role model for me: whenever he came on stage he was “greater than life”- inspired awe and if the Gods of Greece had lookalikes, I have seen one.

There was a joie de vivre, a magnificence whish he transmitted. He was compared with Orson Wells and I see Nicholson (from Chinatown, Prizzi’s Honor) in some of the aura and halo hanging overhead.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#2005-06: With O’Neill

Very few crazies, addicts and aficionados of the ‘King’s Tongue’ remain who have not read this book at one or the other point…

The scene of the play is the back room and section of the bar of Harry Hope’s saloon in the year 1912.

It is a low dive frequented by a bizarre assortment of bums, male and female, most of them downhearted wrecks who find in liquor, openhandedly supplied by the easy-going proprietor.

This is a true escape from the realities of the world in which they no longer have a place. Pariahs, all of them!!

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

Here are the damaged souls who in their day have sought success, honour and grandeur — a Boer War general, a British captain, a disenchanted anarchist, a Harvard Law School graduate, a Negro gambler, a circus man, a barkeeper, street walkers, a youth who has betrayed his mother and the political cause that was her life…. Life thrives here in all its glory…

“Let him come! I have seen them come before -- at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy!”

Each of these down-and-outs, try in his garish moment, to explain himself, to account for his fiasco or deny it. And each is driven eventually to forget or ignore it. Each manages to endure, to tolerate, to suffer himself by creating some kind of misapprehension, some illusion, some brand of smitten pipedream.

As the play opens, they are impatiently awaiting the arrival of Hickey, former friend and companion of them all, a salesman who turns up occasionally to give them a party.

Hickey turns up on schedule, and delivers them extravagant entertainment. However, he also provides, what they have not expected and surely never wanted --- a long lecture on the evils of pipe dreaming.

He has himself stopped drinking, and he claims that he has at last faced reality; not otherwise, he tells them, they can win contentment.

He encourages each of his friends to begin a new life of peace and contentment where “no pipe dreaming can nag at you again”.

Having, as he thinks, found salvation, he will not rest until he has sold it to others.

They must rid themselves of the “damned guilt that makes you lie to yourself, you’re something you’re not”.

There is something in Hickey’s soulfulness that forces each sorry wreck to sober up long enough to make himself amiable, and start forth to do today what has, for years, been put off till tomorrow.

But each, in turn, comes back to the saloon miserable, disillusioned, facing an intolerable reality.

Hickey’s solution does not work for instead of bringing concord and cheerfulness, it plunges each of its victims still deeper into his well of depression.

But Hickey has not despaired; he will tell his friends how he has found the light, and he tells them the story of his life and how the light came to him.

He, however, reveals more than he had intended, uncovers depths, he had hardly understood himself, and his companions see that he too had his pipedreams. He, who had found happiness in the love of his wife, has killed her in order to save her from himself.

“The last night”, he confesses, I’d driven myself crazy trying to figure some way out of her. But there was only one way, so I killed her...I saw I’d always known that was the only possible way to give her peace and free her from the misery of loving me.” In an excess of fear, momentarily terrified by the revelation of himself that has come from his deep gloom, he denies for a moment what he has just confessed: “You know I must have been insane...But there is no way out.”

“Who the hell cares?” asks Hope as Hickey is taken away by the police. Hope eagerly accepts the explanation that everything Hickey has told him, as well as attempts to reform them, took shape in the mind of a lunatic.

And the bums start drinking again, discovering at first that the whisky has no effect on them, but as Hickey “crazy” notions recede into the background, the liquor begins to exercise its potent magic.

The derelicts drink up again and opportunely relapse into the stupor of the bottle.

Like most of O’Neill’s plays, this one too has been both disparaged and praised.

Its astounding length and its repetitiousness have been attacked. Hordes of critics have suggested that it can be shortened with little loss of effect or meaning.

And even more serious is the question, how the author has developed his theme.

Are these derelicts and their half-crazed visitor representative of the human condition?

There are many ironic parallels here to Christ and His disciples (particularly to the Last Supper) as well as pagan Dionysian echoes.

It has also been pointed out that by withholding the truth about Hickey’s actions, O’Neill creates a powerful melodramatic effect. But this deprives the earlier acts of the complexity they need.

Thus, the overall pessimism of the play is not as fully universalized as O’Neill intended, and the world outside Harry’s backroom is relatively untouched by the demonic forces Hickey releases.

Paradoxically, these very objections themselves are a testament to the stature and scope of the play. No other American playwright has attempted so much and achieved so much.

O’Neill measured himself against the great novelist Herman Melville and, like him, pushed at the limits of form and of his own abilities.

The result transcended the bumpy, unhinged works he produced.

This play is an attempt to deal with the author’s own past. Harry Hope is modelled on the Jimmy-the-Priest’s, a waterfront salon where O’Neill lived for a while when he returned from the sea. Another model is that of the ‘Hell Hole’, a Greenwich Village Speakeasy, where O’Neill sought refuge in drinking bouts through much of the 1920s, even after he was successful. In this very spot, he, at one point, tried to take his own life.

This book would at once make its home in the #1000 Greatest books ever Written, as well as the #100 Greatest Plays of All time.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this.

It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room."

It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize.

But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time.

That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then!

But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation.

It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash."

But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence!

See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character.

And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low.

[Diana Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

33-The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (Play-Physical) 5* Welcome to the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or if your the playwright Eugene O'Neill enter his created world of Harry Hope's Saloon and Boarding House or better stated Bar and Flop House where the cast of characters, of which there are quite a number of them are spending their yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's lost in an alcoholic haze in forgetting their broken pipe dreams. If misery loves company pull up a chair, down some rot gut and enjoy the play. I can't imagine what inspired O'Neill to write such a dark play as it doesn't appear it should have had much of an appeal to a vast audience, and yet it has been performed over the years a number of times. Fortunately, I acquired a copy which included a detailed description of the scenes and also the physical characteristics of the actors ,their emotions and facial expressions. It is indeed a highly emotional and dramatic play. Written in the 1940's it depicts a cheap dive on the West Side of New York, c. 1912. There are 4 acts to the play and they take place in the bar or the bar's back room where the characters come and go. I wasn't sure about this work when I started reading but I have to give credit where it's due and performed by a group of good actors this play would certainly be entertaining.