THEATER CHRONICLE
579
perceiving that he is mad, can dismiss the truths he has taught them
and feel their liquor again (though this statement must be taken on
faith, since here, as in the rest of the play, alcoholism does not have its
customary sour breath, and the characters, like the actors who are im–
personating them, seem to have been swallowing ponies of tea). As the
happy derelicts carouse, one character who is without illusions, the boy
who has betrayed his anarchist mother to the police, goes out and com–
mits suicide, and another character, the philosopher, who is also capable
of facing truth, indicates that he will soon join him in a plunge from
the fire-escape. Life, then, consists of illusion, and if death is reality,
reality is also death.
The odd thing about
The Iceman Cometh
is that this rather bony
synopsis does it perfect justice; in fact, it improves it by substituting,
whenever possible, the word
illusion
for the word
pipe-dream,
which
recurs with a crankish and verbally impoverished tastelessness about
two hundred times during the play. What shreds of naturalism cling
to this work are attached to and encumber the dialogue; the-language
has the wooden verisimilitude, the flat, dead, echoless sound of stale slang
that makes Farrell's novels and the later works of Sinclair Lewis so
stilted. O'Neill here has not even the justification of sociological ped–
antry, which these other writers might bring forward. His intention is
symbolic and philosophical, but {Jnfortunately you cannot write a Platonic
dialogue in the style of
Casey At the Bat.
O'Neill might have studied the
nature of illusion through the separate relations to illusion of a group
of characters
(The Three Sisters),
but his people are given but a single
trait each, and they act and react, in the loss and recapture of illusion,
not individually but in a body. Bare and plain, this play has the structure
of an argument; its linguistic deficiencies make it maudlin. How is your
wife getting along with the iceman, the characters roar, over and over
again, and though death is the iceman, the joke is not appreciably
refined by this symbolic treatment; rather, it is death that is coarsened.
Yet it must be said for O'Neill that he is probably the only man
in the world who is still laughing at the iceman joke or pondering its
implications. He is certainly the only writer who would have the courage
or the lack of judgment to build a well-made play around it. This
sense of one man's isolation is what, above all, gives
The I ceman Cometh
its salient look. Though it is full of reminders of Saroyan (the bar–
room, the loose-witted philosophical talk, the appearance of the Redeemer
at the middle table), of O'Casey (again the drunkards, and the tense,
frightened young man who has betrayed the Cause), of Ibsen, Thornton
Wilder, and even of Maxwell Anderson (the ripples of the Mooney
and Sacco-Vanzetti cases which lap at the edges of a distant slum, and
again the home-made philosophy)
The Iceman Cometh
seems never–
theless estranged from all influences and impressions. Its solitariness
inside its rigid structure suggests the prison or the asylum or the sound
of a man laughing in a square, empty room.
MARY McCARTHY
