O’NIHILISM

Commenting on Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (Calendar, Feb. 23), Dan Sullivan says that O’Neill “wants to improve you” and that his message is: “Suspect the savior. Abjure the man who has seen the light.” Unless, of course, he is O’Neill.

For O’Neill himself is the man behind the mask of the play’s central character, ‘Hickey’--peddling as profundity a juvenile pessimism and nihilism.

This is O’Neill’s dream--just as much a fantasy as those of his assorted characters. It is an attempt to escape the painful tension between the glory and the heartbreak of life--so vividly expressed in recent days by the Challenger disaster.

True art is caught in that tension and so leaves us with a deepened sense of the mystery of being human. For O’Neill there is no such tension. To him, life is simply not worth living. He never allows that it might be.

Sullivan thinks young people are now showing an interest in O’Neill because “They want to hear the facts of life.” They won’t. They will simply get another shabby recipe for flight.

The performances in this play may be great but, as Sullivan knows, Sir Henry Irving enthralled audiences in such rubbish as “The Bells” and “The Wandering Jew.” Let’s hope O’Neill’s pretentious and maudlin works will soon join those turkeys in oblivion.

FELIX DOHERTY

Bellflower