Ned Averill-Snell and Ernie Rowland. Credit: Megan Lamasney
Jason Vaughan Evans, Ernie Rowland, Jack Holloway, Hugh Timoney, Slake Counts, Tom Crutcher, Joshua Goff, Jordan Foote, Nick Hoop, Michael Mahoney and Randy Rosenthal. Credit: Megan Lamasney
The Iceman Cometh
2.5 out of 5 stars
$20. Through July 3; Thurs.-Sat., 7 p.m. and Sun., 3 p.m.
University of South Florida Theatre Building, Studio 120, 3837 USF Holly Dr., Tampa. tamparep.org.
Having recently spent five hours watching the Tampa Rep production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, I feel obligated to warn potential audience members that this is not a play that justifies its length with its variety. Iceman may have a profoundly important theme, and its dialogue may be consistently inspired, but this drama is also repetitious to the point of madness. It’s reported that when O’Neill’s Broadway director suggested cuts, the playwright declined, saying, “I intended to be repeated 18 times.”
Well, O’Neill got his wish, leaving the rest of us with the conviction that, at two-thirds the length, this might have been a masterpiece. The pity’s the greater as there are some wonderful performers among the 19 members of the Tampa Rep cast, led by the splendid Ned Averill-Snell in the part of Hickey the Iceman, and also including Ernie Rowland, Jordan Foote, Slake Counts, Josh Goff, Randy Rosenthal, Michael Mahoney, Nick Hoop, and Sam Burke. To make the length problem more exasperating, C. David Frankel’s direction is superb, often presenting us with tableaux so visually striking, they look like something out of Edward Hopper as informed by Charles Bukowski. I don’t doubt that a rapidly moving plot can keep a long play fascinating — it works with Angels in America and August: Osage County — but in the 300 minutes of Iceman,there are really only four or five essential events, and they’re repeated so often — in different guises but with the same significance — that it’s hard not to lose interest. O’Neill or not, this play is eventually just tedious.
"C. David Frankel’s direction is superb, often presenting us with tableaux so visually striking, they look like something out of Edward Hopper as informed by Charles Bukowski."
The drama takes place in Harry Hope’s saloon and rooming house, a dead-end location for desperate bottom-feeders who want nothing more complicated than to stay drunk and occasionally sleep. Over the play’s four acts, we come to know the “pipe dreams” that keep these bums alive: This one will return to the newspaper business, this one will take up an aborted legal career, this one will return as a hero to his native South Africa, and so on and so forth (there are about a dozen derelicts in the bar, and it takes time to introduce each one). After a long first act in which we come to know each despondent character, Theodore Hickman or “Hickey” arrives with a message. No more is he just a jokester and drink-buyer: Now he’s learned the truth, which is, you’ve got to give up on your pipe dreams in order to come alive. For the next three acts, we watch the barflies first resist and then try to absorb this new knowledge. But as anyone who remembers Ibsen’s (much briefer, much more potent) The Wild Duck will anticipate, it’s not always salutary to have your illusions shattered, and unreality is sometimes all a weak and battered soul can take. So Hickey brings not just truth but contention and the prospect of self-loathing to his down-and-out clientele. Finally, we get to the long fourth act, in which Hickey’s own — and his long-suffering wife’s — story is the subject. Averill-Snell’s performance of this monologue is outstanding — if you still have patience enough to listen.
But enough complaining: There are beauties in this production, and it would be unkind to ignore them. The look of the derelicts in several of the scenes — slumped over, sleeping, half-conscious, stupefied — is more expressive in its quiet way than much of the dialogue. O’Neill seems to have wanted a Last Supper look for his assembled vagrants, and director Frankel delivers this vividly, along with other pictorial triumphs. The three “tarts” in the bar — their pipe dream is that they’re not whores — are nicely impersonated by Cassidy Brooks, Sarah Pullman-Atanacio and Erin Foster, and the out-of-prison anarchist Hugo (Rosenthal) is so skillfully created, he seems to have arrived from some Platonic realm of Washed-Up Revolutionaries. The sets for Harry Hope’s bar are well-rendered by Lea Umberger, and the scene in which Hope himself tries to leave his bar for the first time in 20 years is so effective, it makes most of the other scenes quite unnecessary. If it’s suggested too often, there’s nonetheless power in O’Neill’s idea that we all, to some extent, cover over our failures with daydreams and denial. And there’s real grandeur in Averill-Snell’s performance, one of the best I’ve seen by one of our best actors.
