STAGE REVIEW : ‘ICEMAN’ DELIVERS AT THE DOOLITTLE

It was appropriate that “The Iceman Cometh” should have opened at the Doolittle Theatre on Lincoln’s birthday. Eugene O’Neill is the American theater’s Great Railsplitter, felling and shaping his plays with an ax, measuring by feet rather than inches, and never quitting until the job is done.

In the case of “Iceman,” the job takes five hours, with intermissions. The first act is particularly slow, with the rummies in Harry Hope’s bleak saloon slumped with their heads on the table like dead men--at least until their boy Hickey (Jason Robards, spruce as a vaudeville star) comes on. Director Jose Quintero could easily have added background motion and cut some of the repetitive things that Harry’s patrons have to say to each other. We get the picture!

But as he did in his first, famous revival of “Iceman” 30 years ago at Circle-in-the-Square, Quintero refuses to be hurried. This is the way O’Neill wants the play to go, he says: Be still and listen. One might wish that Quintero hadn’t been so scrupulous about preserving every jot and tittle of the text, but he’s right, as we see at the Doolittle. “Iceman” has got to be long--even too long. As Harry Hope (the wonderful Barnard Hughes) says, it’s a wake. Ghosts don’t appear at a wake until the small hours.

The genius of this production--”genius” isn’t too strong--is its eeriness. Much tosh has been produced about the haunted heroes of Eugene O’Neill, and when he falls for this tosh himself (as in “Strange Interlude”), the results are embarrassing. But this sawdust-on-the-floor dive does invoke a kind of purgatory. You can imagine unfriendly shades watching the characters from the dark corners of Ben Edwards’ set and tittering at the measly lies that humans tell themselves in order to put some kind of face on their existence.

Even funnier, from the demonic point of view, are their truths. Robards as Hickey exemplifies the man illumined by the Secret of Life--which turns out to be the Secret of Death. That Harry and his crowd are too apathetic and fearful to go with him is their salvation. Perhaps we think of other congregations that followed their Messiah to the end--Jim Jones’, for instance. Like all great plays, “The Iceman Cometh” (written in 1939) has a surprising prescience.

It is a great play, for all its awkwardness. O’Neill is talking about matters of life and death here, in terms of this barroom and these whores, on this particular night. If, on the one hand, Harry’s dive is purgatory--in this, the play seems to prefigure Sartre’s “No Exit”--it’s also a recognizable hellhole in New York, circa 1912.

O’Neill knows his men, the distance between what they are and what they started out to be: Rocky the bartender (John Pankow); Hugo the anarchist (Gerald Hiken); Larry the nihilistic “foolosopher” (Donald Moffat); the aptly named Jimmy Tomorrow (James Greene); young Parritt, the play’s Judas (Paul McCrane); tremble-handed Willie Oban (John Christopher Jones); Joe Mott, the black man (Roger Robinson); the aristocratic Captain (Bill Moor); the affable General (Frederick Neumann). And O’Neill knows the kind of “pipe dream” each devises for himself to keep the truth at bay.

Sad as this is, it’s often very funny as well, particularly when Hickey has challenged his friends to take up their beds and walk, as it were. Hughes is particularly funny here, his body absolutely refusing to take a straight line to the door. There’s more laughter to be had in this barroom than one remembered.

But “Iceman” is also as cold and dark as the iceman’s truck used to be. Robards chills you with that long monologue about how he released his wife out of “love” for her. But the chill is set up early. If he’s dapper and vital on that first entrance, there’s also something unearthly about that shining boyish face--a sense of the death’s head underneath the grin. (Thomas R. Skelton’s lighting undoubtedly contributes something here, but one would have to look sharp to catch the exact contribution.)

As he tap-dances around, flashing his cuffs, greeting the gang, we see the vitality they love. Later, the restlessness starts to read differently. This is a man with a spear in his side, unable to be still--for all his talk about having found peace. His mind is buying the pipe dream, but his body refuses it. And at the climax of his revelation he finally hears himself, and the roof caves in.

This was a great performance 30 years ago. Without being any less physically impressive today--and vocally impressive: those long speeches are indeed arias--Robards has more spiritual authority today. It is a performance to put with one’s memories of Olivier, but only an American actor could know Hickey this well from the inside.

Elsewhere, Quintero has cast and mounted the play virtually without flaw. The Larry Slade-Don Parritt story may get a trifle lost, but that’s not to fault either Moffat or McCrane--the balance simply favors Robards. The physical production will linger for some time in the mind’s eye, including Jane Greenwood’s costumes--grays, browns, defeated colors that still retain dignity. “The Iceman Cometh” demands and rewards the viewer’s patience. It is a slow freight to somewhere. ‘THE ICEMAN COMETH’

Eugene O’Neill’s play, at the James A. Doolittle Theatre. Produced by the American National Theater. Presented by UCLA Center for the Arts, the Theatre Group, Inc., Lewis Allen, James Nederlander, Stephen Graham and Ben Edwards. Director Jose Quintero. Scenery Ben Edwards. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Lighting Thomas R. Skelton. Production stage manager Mitchell Erickson. Casting Meg Simon/Fran Kumin. With John Pankow, Donald Moffat, Gerald Hiken, John Christopher Jones, Barnard Hughes, Roger Robinson, Paul McCrane, Bill Moor, Frederick Neumann, James Greene, Pat McNamara, Allen Swift, Natalia Nogulich, Elaine Welton Hill, Kristine Nielsen, Harris Laskawy, Jason Robards, Mike Genovese and Walter Flanagan. Plays at 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with 3 p.m. matinees Sundays. Closes March 9. Tickets $15-$25. 1615 N. Vine St. (213) 462-6666.