The Iceman Cometh

As subscribers to the Metropolitan Ensemble Theater (MET) of Kansas City, a not-for-profit arts organization having an educational as well as an entertainment mission, we expected the best from its recent production of The Iceman Cometh, and we were not disappointed. Audience members were skillfully drawn into an epic theatrical experience, featuring marathon performances by the MET's huge cast of twenty-one actors, several of whom were beyond accomplished—they were brilliant! The MET has earned a reputation for high-quality, serious artistic accomplishments over the past eighteen seasons for reprising venerable works such as Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, as well as seldom performed plays like Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Nicholas Wright's Vincent in Brixton, Pearl Cleage's Flyin' West, and Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51.The MET production emphasized Iceman's distinctive and troubled historical positioning. Nearly all of the characters are significantly damaged male elders: impoverished rooming-house inhabitants seeking the silence and solace of barroom drink and oblivion. The late 1890s and early 1900s were a time of radical political ferment in the United States. The Socialist Party was active in elections, and the International Workers of the World were engaged in direct action and speechifying in the streets of Kansas City and across industrial and rural America. In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. By 1912, "the movement" was at its height in the United States. Such is the ostensible time frame for Iceman. But the play was written during the Depression in 1939 and first published in 1946, on the threshold of the Cold War.Among the washed-up figures are European expats and a variety of once-ambitious Americans. Two of the Europeans had sought glory in imperial war-making in South Africa, another through French syndicalism and utopian sensationalism. Several American characters had been radical activists but are now derelict and debilitated, corrupted by laziness, two-bit lust for power, political defeat, or personal failure.The play asks challenging questions about old age, especially among septuagenarian men. What gives life meaning? When is a "pipe dream" a betrayal? Is a successful life to be found in work or avoidance of work? In resistance to bosses? In business and salesmanship, joking loquacity, crude sex, gambling, military service? Taciturn disengagement? Periodical or uninterrupted alcoholic binges―a quiet comfort zone or a stupor at the end of a wasted life? What to think of death and suicide? A seam of toxic masculinity and racism is also present (that of the particularly ugly era prior to women's suffrage, the women's movement of the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Black Lives Matter), yet the dignified if also marginalized presence of a lone Black figure in the narrative helps the racial and gender bigotry come across with a distinctly critical edge.Staging at this theater varies with each production. For Iceman, audience members entered by walking around the barroom set to seats on surrounding church pews. The stage had a mythically large set of false exit doors, which swung open to the grand outside world, utilized in the second half. Additionally, the theater's lobby contains an actual bar, meaning that patrons could bring their drinks with them to their seats, adding to the barroom atmosphere. In a previous play, the entire action was in the lobby/bar area.Costume fabrics and colors and light were effectively used: drab and dusty when characters are in their most despondent mode, yet vibrant in the second half when striking disposition changes were called for, particularly in the case of the two Boer War veterans. The gold of Hickey's suit and watch were also impressive. Lighting and costume design were handled by Karen Paisley, who is also the MET's producing artistic director. The acting across the board was superb, especially of the two main characters, Larry Slade (John Clancy), he of the iron disdain for life; and Hickey (John Cleary), the crazed, hyperenergetic fugitive who presents himself to his old friends as a rejuvenated liberator. Other actors brought poignancy and comic relief to their roles, due in part to Bob Paisley's strong direction.Ice can symbolize death and defeat. If it comes our way, we may be "iced" or "iced-out." Yet ice can also preserve what is otherwise perishable. The dramatist-as-iceman can both repudiate dreams and preserve a liberating understanding of the conflicted human condition. The MET production demonstrated that O'Neill's art helps conserve our latent power for our future needs. Well played by these capable actors, this Iceman captivated audience members from its beginning to its end, three hours later.