I finally got around to reading Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. It's a remarkable play. More than a bit dated, but its power is still profound. Yet it seems to break most of the rules of theater. There's a large group of characters, which makes it hard to identify with any of them. And almost all of them (and all of the major ones) are alcoholics who seem hell-bent on destroying themselves, which is way out of my realm of personal experience. Also, there's very little movement on stage. There's very little onstage violence. No romance at all. And the damned thing lasts for four hours. And just to top all of that off, The Iceman never actually Cometh.
And yet...this thing pulled me along like a fast-paced action movie.
Some of that is O'Neill's wordcraft, of course. Like this:
"As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, but this is all black, and that is all white."
Or this:
"Hasn't he been mixed up with some woman? I don't mean trollops.. I mean the old real love stuff that crucifies you."
And the big kapow of this:
"I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober."
I've often thought that at least some people who become alcoholics do it because they need some insulation from the daily atrocities of living.
In fact, if I had the stomach for it (and I mean that literally), I think I would have been an alcoholic for that reason. Alcohol not only makes you feel good, it also pushes the world away, makes it less barbed, can even make it funny. There have been many times when I needed that. There've been many times when I got that from alcohol.
But despite the fact that I haven't had a hangover since I was in my early twenties, I pay dearly for any heavy drinking I do. My guts quiver and shake themselves to pieces for days. Nausea fills up every crevice of my soul.
So I rarely drink at all anymore.
But my father was an alcoholic. My oldest sister, too. And one of the most important relationships in my life was with a woman who was floating in a sea of alcohol. So I have definitely taken in the view.
There's more to The Iceman Cometh than alcoholism, though. In fact, I'd have to say that the play isn't really about alcohol abuse at all. And that hit me around the halfway point of the play, when I started thinking about it as a counterpoint to Waiting for Godot.
I know Waiting for Godot. I wrestled with that play for years, actually loathing it, before it finally clicked into place in my brain, and I've since read it dozens of times and taught it at least two hands' fingers' worth of times. I've watched two movies of it several times apiece, and travelled to New York City to see it performed onstage (with John Goodman as Pozzo). I can't stop myself from quoting it on a regular basis. ("What do we do now, now that we are happy?")
I don't know The Iceman Cometh very well at all, having just read it for the first time and never having seen it played, live or in movie, all the way through. But it is fresh in my mind, so I think I have a tentative grasp of it...at least for another hour or so.
So here it is: I think that when O'Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh, he essentially reduced all of the elements of playwriting to what he thought was the absolute minimum. He made the stage pretty flat: tables and chairs. And he made it virtually the same for four acts. He gave a large cast of characters, then gave them only the most superficial...and cliched...characteristics. Then he drained most of the plot out of the story, so what was left were a series of small arguments.
And then Beckett took it all one step further: he took all but five (you could argue six, but you'd be wrong) of the characters away, took away almost all of the setting, and killed the plot. It might be as far as you can go in terms of reductionist theater...unless you want to get into some bullshit where a character stands on an empty stage for an hour and a half and then the lights go down, and I'm hoping that none of us wants to see that...not even Mark Rothko.
To what end?
In my mind, to the end of getting down to the essence of life and reality.
Do I contradict myself?
No.
If you're not running away from a bear, then you're really just wasting time. (©Brother K Enterprises) I have a friend who spends hours several times a week playing bridge. She herself says that it's a waste of time...but she enjoys it. And isn't that what time is for? I spend at least an hour of every day reading. I'll forget most of what I read in a few weeks. And much of what I retain will be inconsequential. So most (possibly all) of that is a waste of time. But I enjoy it. And you can name your poison here. Anything you name wherein you are not running away from a bear (metaphorically speaking, of course) is a waste of time. Watching television, going to the movies, going to plays, eating at restaurants, going on dates, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Penny a point, ain't no one keeping score.
Which made me wonder if Beckett had been influenced by O'Neill. I wasn't sure of the timelines, so I went to the Wikkans.
For Godot, "The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The premiere, directed by Roger Blin, was on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone [fr], Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
For Iceman: "First published in 1946, the play premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 9, 1946...."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iceman_Cometh
I found it interesting that both of these plays had a delayed birth experience. Beckett's had to wait 4 years before it hit the stage. And according to the front matter in Iceman, it was copyright 1940 as an unpublished work, so it really took 6 years for it to make it to the stage.
But clearly Iceman preceded Godot. I'm not going to go to the trouble of finding out if Beckett actually knew of The Iceman Cometh (assuming that could be discovered), though, so I'll just leap to my own foregone conclusion: yes.
I have spoken.
Now I'm going to go read some more of Eugene O'Neill's plays.
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