The Theatregoer The Iceman Cometh

at the Charles Street Playhouse

I WOULD like to write that Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the first production this season at the Charles Street Playhouse is a play about illusion and reality. Now in Hum 7 you are told that all plays are about illusion and reality, and so to say that a particular play is especially concerned with the subject isn't to say very much at all. Realizing, then, that somewhere near a thousand students have already recognized the immediate inanity of my initial proposition, perhaps a few, extremely tentative assertions can redeem the case.

For, it also seems to me, The Iceman Cometh deals with a peculiarly American varient of the illusion-and-reality game. Although O'Neill's play is set in the back room of Harry Hope's bar- "What is it? It's the No Chance Saloon. It's Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe." -during the summer of 1912, it is quite easy to imagine Miller's Willy Loman as well as Albee's George and Martha in quite the same milieu. Iceman -along with the two more familiar war-horses of the American theatre-is suffused with the mist of many pipe dreams. Harry Hope, who hasn't stepped outside of his establishment since the death of his wife twenty years past, dreams of taking a "walk around the ward" to reestablish his political contacts; Willy Loman dreams of being "liked, well liked," while George and Martha carry on about the existence of a non-existent son. And so they all manage to inhabit their two worlds simultaneously: one world. "reality," a vulgar inversion of an American's dreams, and the other, "illusion," a sustaining hope that a never-attainable future will reestablish the supremacy of the ideal.

Strangely, this schizophrenic existence is essentially painless. Unlike the Quixote legend, illusion rarely distorts the ongoing process of reality. Similarly, reality makes no effort to cancel out the shadows of illusion. Richard Nixon's rhetoric about peace and honor frees him to fight his protracted little war, while exponentially proliferating talk of justice and the people permit us to support our tacky revolutions. As long as the two camps don't come into contact, no problem.

BASICALLY, I'm pretty apolitical. Given a choice between polities and art, I prefer my art unsullied. So, why ain't this a drama review you ask, Because I began last Sunday by reading the Times' "The Week in Review," which predicted that the nation would stumble into yet another cataclysm sometime this fall. Like by October 15, and certainly by the November march on Washington that is bound to follow. Poor Richard is likely to feel quite threatened, as he did at last week's news conference where he said that Senator Goodell's plan to end the war by the end of 1970 might endanger his own efforts to end it sooner. When he's boxed into a corner, a man does strange things. And we're all heading for the same goddamn corner at a godawful stride just at the moment.

Having read the paper, I then went to the Charles. Michael Murray has directed a uniformly competent and completely absorbing production of the O'Neill play in which this problem of "illusion" being forced to confront "reality" takes on a special intensity. As Hickey, the salesman who contradicts his usual role by bringing honesty into Hope's saloon, Richard Kneeland, constantly snapping his fingers with a threatening urgency, is a chilling reminder of how frightening a spectre the truth can be.

For it can be said that the Salesman-like his generic brothers, the Rainmaker and the Politician- is a particularly American phenomenon. To sell his goods, he must sell us belief in their validity. And since we in America have been ever striving to establish "a more perfect union," since our whole system of government pretends to be based on one great burst of philosophizing in the middle of 1787, and since we have no sense of our past history by which to assess our progress, the Salesman has been most successful when pandering to our dreams and illusions. But, now, he's trying the truth. Superficially, the truth only concerns Vietnam. In actuality it embraces a whole mode of existence.

I have been unfair to the general excellence of the Charles production by not dealing with it more directly, but, then again, one would suspect these are hard days for art with politics so prevalent. O'Neill suggests that if we give up our pipe dreams only death remains. I'm not sure how you translate that into political terms. But I'm sure the process has begun.