The Iceman Cometh

Goodman Theatre, Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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Any fresh staging of this Eugene O’Neill drama would be worth seeing, “even if it were merely adequate,” said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. That’s because few theater companies in the country ever tackle O’Neill’s mammoth, five-hour-long work, which he wrote in 1939. This tale of despair in a 1912 saloon “calls for a large cast led by a tireless actor who oozes charisma from every pore.” His job: to play Hickey, a newly sober traveling salesman whose attempt to improve the lot of his former bar buddies fuels O’Neill’s tragedy. Director Robert Falls’s choice for that role is an unlikely one. Actor Nathan Lane is probably best known for comedy and crowd-pleasing. Here, though, “Lane gives a performance that will stay with you as long as you live.”

It’s ironic that Lane’s previous Chicago appearance was in the touring musical The Addams Family, said Steven Oxman in Variety. As dissimilar as that show was, “he’s still hanging out with the undead” here. O’Neill’s zombies, though, are far more heartbreaking. Brian Dennehy is “quietly intense” as Larry Slade, a former anarchist who now spends his time “blankly staring forward, trying not to feel anything.” As bartender Harry Hope, Stephen Ouimette seems by evening’s end to have “formed another set of circles under his eyes.” Still, the closing act belongs to Lane. His climactic monologue, after everybody’s pipe dreams have shattered, reveals that this is a comedian who can “turn a character’s soul inside out.”