Word: neill
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Eugene O'Neill. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Able did much (if not all) of their best work for the Broadway stage. Beckett received his first American production on one. Broadway was the place where technical aspects of the theater were developed to perfection. Broadway producers and directors were responsible for the creation of the musical, which, in such shows as West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, has proved to be the only uniquely American contribution to world theater. But all this now belongs to the past, And so does Goldman's book. It is best...
...also seems to me, The Iceman Cometh deals with a peculiarly American varient of the illusion-and-reality game. Although O'Neill's play is set in the back room of Harry Hope's bar- "What is it? It's the No Chance Saloon. It's Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe." -during the summer of 1912, it is quite easy to imagine Miller's Willy Loman as well as Albee's George and Martha in quite the same milieu. Iceman -along with the two more familiar war-horses of the American theatre-is suffused with the mist...
...WOULD like to write that Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the first production this season at the Charles Street Playhouse is a play about illusion and reality. Now in Hum 7 you are told that all plays are about illusion and reality, and so to say that a particular play is especially concerned with the subject isn't to say very much at all. Realizing, then, that somewhere near a thousand students have already recognized the immediate inanity of my initial proposition, perhaps a few, extremely tentative assertions can redeem the case...
Having read the paper, I then went to the Charles. Michael Murray has directed a uniformly competent and completely absorbing production of the O'Neill play in which this problem of "illusion" being forced to confront "reality" takes on a special intensity. As Hickey, the salesman who contradicts his usual role by bringing honesty into Hope's saloon, Richard Kneeland, constantly snapping his fingers with a threatening urgency, is a chilling reminder of how frightening a spectre the truth...
...have been unfair to the general excellence of the Charles production by not dealing with it more directly, but, then again, one would suspect these are hard days for art with politics so prevalent. O'Neill suggests that if we give up our pipe dreams only death remains. I'm not sure how you translate that into political terms. But I'm sure the process has begun...