Theater Chronicle
DRY ICE
THE ICEMAN CoMETH,
by
Eugene O'Neill, Martin Beck Theater.
T
HE CRUCIAL FIGURE of O'Neill's new play is a mad hardware sales–
man. Consonantly, the play itself is like some stern piece of hardware
in one of those dusty old-fashioned stores into which no Pyrex dish or
herb shelf or French provincial earthenware had yet penetrated, which
dealt
in
iron-colored enamel, galvanized tin, lengths of pipe and wrenches,
staples, saws, and nails, and knew nothing more sophisticated than the
double boiler. Ugly, durable, mysteriously utilitarian, this work gives
the assurance that it has been manufactured by a reliable company ; it
is guaranteed to last two-and-a-half hours longer than any other play,
with the exception of the uncut
Hamlet.
The Iceman Cometh
is indeed made of ice or iron; it is full of will
and fanatic determination; it appears to have hardened at some extreme
temperature of the mind. In the theater today, it is attractive positively
because of its defects. To audiences accustomed to the oily virtuosity of
George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan,
the return of a playwright who--to be frank-cannot write is a solemn
and sentimental occasion. O'Neill belongs to that group of American
authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation
was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed
the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph;
all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they de–
creed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat. What they
produce is hard to praise or to condemn; how is one to judge the great,
logical symphony of a tone-deaf musician? Pulpy in detail, their work
has nevertheless a fine solidity of structure; they drive an idea or a theme
step by step to its brutal conclusion with the same terrible force they
have brought to bear on their fugitive profession. They are among the
few contemporary American writers who know how to exhaust a subject;
yet, in the end, the effect is a little too much like that of a vacuum
cleaner-the book is full but the world is empty. Unlike Shakespeare,
unlike Tolstoy or Homer, they have no curtain of decency to drop on
their heroes' remains; with them, Hector lies unburied, and Danny
O'Neill, starting off to the University of Chicago, is no Fortinbras to
make Studs Lanigan's peace. In their last acts and chapters, they arrive
not at despair but at a strange, blank nihilism. Lacking artistic feeling,
that is, a feeling for texture, they are cut off with their characters from
the world of being and live anxiously in the world of becoming. These
writers are, naturally, masters of suspense.
