The Iceman Cometh

O'Neill's intense play, The Iceman Cometh, is a character-driven philosophical rumination upon the entwined nature of hope and self-deception. To participate in forgetfulness, it seems, we must be willing to indulge our lies and those of our pals. If we do this perhaps we can enjoy the moment with a laugh, a tease, and another free drink: some of the ways of reaching deep into ourselves and thumbing our noses at the rage and guilt that fuel us...and perhaps the only way to stay sane. The characters are memorable, archetypes abound: we have the old philosopher and his eager student (who reminds Hicky so much of himself), the general, the captain, the white/black gambler, the pimp, the revolutionary, the whore, Jimmy Tomorrow, and that last curse of Pandora's box, Hope; in this case Harry Hope. These deadbeats and washouts live off of Hope--literally--without his generosity we couldn't imagine them lasting long, out in the cold. We're continously brought back to love and freedom: why does love always prevent freedom here? All the characters are hopelessly stuck, having given up on life completely and existing only by grace of their pipe dreams--the various ways they've conjured up past or future glory, finding meaning anywhere but here, anytime but now. Good naturedly, they tease each other but each knows that his existence continues only by virtue of his fellow drunks. Once a year they are treated to the attentions and generosity of their wayward friend, Hicky, an always-on-the-move salesman and born psychologist gifted with the ability to size a person up, play to his vanities, and procure a sale as gratitude. Hicky indulges himself in this periodical binge, eager and happy to become what he really is, a lover of drinks and drunkenness, teases and jokes. But this year, as Hope turns old, something is amiss. Hicky's late and when he finally shows up he seems a good natured, if bad mannered, Messiah convinced it's his duty to wake his old pals to reality. He wants them to admit and then relinquish their lies and pipe dreams. With a wink he jabs them in the heart, seeing right through all their clever dreams. If they'll do what he's done, as he commands, then they'll enjoy the peace and contentment that he's found on the other side of lies and drunkenness. Hicky's motivations are mysterious but we're given more and more clues to the awful deed that sparked his transformation into the sober minded, lie eschewing prophet that he's become. We also learn that behind his peace and contentment is a sort of mad dog rage and self repudiation that allows him to see through everyone and everything, including his own sorry self. Though he wants nothing more than to help, at the end he realizes his mistake as all his friends are now unhappy and incapable of becoming drunk, so he permits his pals to write him off and return to their drunken pipe dreams. As an exercise for the imagination, it's interesting to replace Hicky with Nietzsche (Th

...you know that your fascination is morbid, but you can't tear your eyes away from the awfulness of it: the sheer ghoulish drama unfolding before you like some sick joke of the gods. I remember the first time I watched this play. I believe it was Lee Marvin's portrayal of Hickey on a presentation of American Playhouse. I was held from first to last with that jaw-gaping awe that only the best dramatic works can inspire. This is a rare work of the highest measure. It combines its existential angst with portrayals so uncluttered that we are spared the usual contortions of the literati. To be sure, there is symbolism and allusion enough: the entire play takes place in a bar called "Hope"; the setting is a meat packing district, literally the most dead end of dead ends; Hickey sells for a living, a profession that trades on hopes and fears. But these are just passing nods to the writer's craft. O'Neill includes them to keep the acolytes happy. The story depends on neither its setting nor its devices. It would work as well set in some professional clubs I know. This play is concerned with the necessity of delusions. The various characters assembled around the bar waiting for Hickey's appearance are different flavours of delusion. It's like Dante's Inferno, with each character defining a different circle of hell. And when Hickey shows up, his effect is not much short of Satan's. No one could write a play like this today. We have become a society so steeped in cool cynicism that we have lost our authenticity. Today, a theme like O'Neill's could only be invoked with a veiled smirk. Think of all the recent movies that have dealt with this thesis: they are either clichéd, cruel or contemptuous. Consider, for example, "American Beauty". Delusion is a topic we approach with patronizing disdain for fear of seeming earnest. What is the line between delusion and hope? Is hope itself delusional? Perhaps all humans are fundamentally flawed and can only avoid despair by wrapping ourselves in a cloak of unreality and fantasy. Hope is a crutch; avoidance is therapy; unflinching reality leads only to death or to madness. Heavy stuff. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with O'Neill's thesis because this play wasn't written to advance a specific point of view; it was written to exorcise demons. All of O'Neill's great plays were, to varying degrees, products of his suffering. This one came closest to connecting his personal pain with universal aspects of the human condition. This theme scares us because we are all so very vulnerable to self-delusion, and O'Neill's unsparing scrutiny exposes our own fear and pain so candidly that we are forced into self-reflection and humility. This empathy is at the heart of all the great tragedies: we could be as foolish as Lear, as jealous as Othello, as ambitious as Faust, or as delusional as Hickey. Don't set yourself higher than these figures: there but for the grace of God go I.

A quickly read, depressing story of the shattering of dreams. The tale is so descriptive of its hard times that you can imagine it taking place in the dingiest, dreariest dive bar you ever set foot inside. The characters are cranky and irritating, and yet you can somehow appreciate the rut they're in and pity them. The play is brilliant in its power to describe in the briefest way the desperation of these souls, and their willingness to buy their ticket to freedom when the Iceman comes to town. Great surprise finish as well.

During one of the lowest periods of his adult life, from 1911 through about 1915, Eugene O'Neill lived, off and on, in three New York flophouses. These were Jimmy the Priest's, the Hell Hole, and the Garden Hotel. An amalgam of these three served as the model for Harry Hope's in THE ICEMAN COMETH. With the exception of Hickey, every character in the play was based on a friend or acquaintance from this period of his life.The play, written in the 1940's, is set in 1912. All, or almost all, of the down and out residents at Harry Hope's had once lived fairly normal lives with jobs, families, and plans for the future. Each man had a pipe dream, fulfillment of which, he thought, would give him a better life. Each man also had a reason why he could never fulfill his pipe dream.The high point of their lives would come each year on the eve of Harry Hope's birthday when a salesman named Hickey would arrive to begin his periodic binge, For the duration of his stay, the drinks would flow, on Hickey, of course, and an atmosphere of celebration would fill Harry Hope's His visit in the year of the play was different. A new Hickey showed up. This version of Hickey was a messianic salesman who had seen the light and was determined to sell his friends on the necessity of seeing the same light. He told them that he no longer needed the relief that booze had brought him in the past and that he was freed of his problem with pipe dreams.His message was that they could do the same. One by one, he dismantled their pipe dreams and pressured them into trying to make their pipe dreams real. He succeeded in sowing seeds of misery in each of them, and each soon discovered that his pipe dream was all he had. Without his pipe dream he had nothing to live for.They detected that Hickey might not really be as happy as he had let on and they challenged him to reveal how he had rid himself of his problem with pipe dreams so successfully. Hickey, in an almost manic mood, then described a life of drunkenness, dishonesty, and infidelity, including contracting venereal disease and transmitting it to his wife. She had always forgiven him for his infidelities and abuses because she had a pipe dream that he would reform.In his guilt, knowing that he would never reform, he began to hate her pipe dream and her along with it. Because of his fear that she would eventually be unable to forgive him further, he destroyed her pipe dream by murdering her in her sleep.While he was relating this, two detectives who had been searching for him had arrived and heard this confession. When he realized that they had heard, he immediately claimed that what he had just said was the result of insanity.Everyone seized on the word insanity and, convinced themselves that Hickey was insane, rationalized going back to the pipe dreams that he had destroyed, and thus back to their harmonious existence. Each character then narrated a face-saving version of wha

O'Neill's finest drama, The Iceman Cometh, is a compelling tale of desolation. The play centers around its characters hope for a different and more fulfilling life. Driven to hide from society and anathetize their problems with alchohol and pipe dreams, deluding themselves into thinking their lives have a psuedo-promise for a vague future imporvement; the characters converge in Harry Hope's squalid bar in New York City's meat-packing district. There, they live a past-obsessed life based incongrously on a fantasy future. When Hickey, an old friend who comes to the bar on periodic binges, comes and forces the others to confront their pipe dreams, we learn the value of sustaining illusions to those whose lives are so desolate that they have nothing else to live for. The Iceman Cometh is a classic of the American theater and I wholeheartedly reccomend it to everyone.