Twelve years ago, the most exalted playwright in the history of the U.S. theater formally bowed off his worldwide stage. Eugene O'Neill intended to devote himself exclusively to one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken: the writing of a cycle of nine plays. Purpose: to dramatize the fate of a U.S. family and of the U.S. itself during a period of some 180 years (1754 to 1932).
One afternoon last week, for reasons best known to himself, O'Neill was back on Broadway with a mysterious play, mysteriously titled The Iceman Cometh, which would run for four and a quarter hours, with a 75-minute break for supper.
Towards 4:30* on that "first night" afternoon, some 1,200 people made the Martin Beck Theater resonant with that exhilarating precurtain buzz, like leaves before a storm, which has been familiar to theatergoers for 2,500 years. There was plenty to buzz about. There was the exciting fact that The Iceman Cometh was the first new O'Neill play to be produced since Days without End (1934). There was its cryptic title, clumsily poetic, naively sardonic and intensely O'Neillian, which caused one foreboding wag to suggest that a better name would be The Ice Tray Always Sticks Twice. The play had been rehearsed under heavy wrappings of secrecy. Almost nobody in the audience was sure what it was about, though some had paid $25 a seat to find out. But some people were already buying seats for February. For, whether the play was good or bad, theatergoers knew that the return of Eugene O'Neill was a .major event in the theater. Then, as the lights went faint, the buzz of excitement dissolved into silence. In the dimness, like the opening of a vast mouth, the curtain rose.
The Play. It rose on something harshly picturesque, something that through four long acts was to keep its soiled color and fuddled humanity, but that did not seem really impressive when it was over.
The opening scene was pure George Bellows—a seedy Bowery-type bar in the year 1912, littered with slumped and sleeping drunken bums.* Soaks of all descriptions—a Harvard man, a British infantry captain, a Boer War correspondent, a Negro gambler, an unbadged police lieutenant, a disillusioned anarchist—they had been reduced by rotgut to creatures of one baggy shape. What kept them hanging by a claw to life was the kindness of the drunken-bum saloonkeeper (finely played by Dudley Digges), and their pipe dreams, their mumbling that tomorrow would turn up a winning card or bring forth a better man.
This morning, however—while tarts forked over to the barkeep pimp, and a young anarchist stool pigeon crawled in to hide away—the bums were waiting for a highflying drummer named Hickey, who once a year threw them a big party and got as drunk as they did. But when * Outstanding in the Theatre Guild's generally good production were Robert Edmond Jones's sets.
Hickey (James Barton) finally came, he was not the fellow they knew; the party was to go on, he said, but he was not drinking. Something had happened to him, he had found peace by facing "reality"; and he jabbed away at them to do likewise.