The Iceman Cometh

Rating: get real. It's a play.The Publisher Says: Eugene O’Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O’Neill’s darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, [...]

"O'Neill uses the phrasethe big sleepthroughout his play as a synonym for death," advises Ray Chandler, "apparently in the belief that it's an accepted underworld expression. If so, I'd like to see whence it comes, because I invented the expression. I never saw the phrase in print before I used it. The tenor of his writing here shows that he knows very little about the subject."The playwright also bops us over the head with the phrase "pipe dreams." It takes him over four hours to say life is on [...]

I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered [...]

I enjoy going to the theater. I always have. But unless you live in New York or Toronto or Los Angeles and have unlimited money and endless free evenings you just can't see that many of the great plays in a lifetime. This simple fact is why I started reading plays and why I know that plays are meant to be read as well as performed.No American drama supports this assertion more than "The Iceman Cometh". It has a huge cast and goes on for hours and hours. It has had some memorable productions, mos [...]

Eugene O'Neill is America's finest playwright. You may argue that Miller or Inge or Capote have this or that or anything else, but no one put everything together in such a classic manner as O’Neill. To read or watch an O’Neill play is properly a life altering experience. Very often, as with the present work, it ought to leave one’s life in shambles, the veritable house of cards you always knew it was but hoped no one else would notice.The Iceman Cometh is a tragedy, but one in which you fi [...]

"To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything." -Larry, The Iceman Cometh Act One.The first time I picked this play up, I had a feeling I was going to really enjoy it. Well, "enjoy" is probably the wrong word to use, even as I am a now twice-read, twice-seen, fan of this Eugene O'Neill play. Other words like "appreciate" and "identify with" come to mind. It's a hard play to digest.Americans occasionally give great playwrights permission to be l [...]

I have just finished reading this with 2 of my closest friends. The setting was my living room which perhaps felt like the bar in the play, with a few bedrooms upstairs. Oh man, that was so insanely wonderful. Reading out loud and in character is how plays are meant to be read. On the other note, the play was great. I love dark elements to writing. There was a lot of talk about pipe dreams, which isn't a term I use a lot, I don't even really know what it means. I have come to the conclusion that [...]

I've not sat down to read a play I didn't know in a long time, so maybe that's part of the problem, but this is poor. Perhaps at the time it seemed new and strange - but now it just feels like the grandfather of every clunking moment-of-truth modern play that every dramatist who ever thought Chekhov made it look easy wrote for every actor who wanted a showcase for their mighty skills. If Arthur Miller had a brother who'd had to make every point with a sledgehammer, who had never heard the phrase [...]

I loved this play so much as a teenager, and I don't know why. I liked the way Hickey could pass himself off as a regular guy, always smiling and joking, while inside he was crazy with hatred. I think because I had a lot of anger myself I liked the idea that you could be angry and still "get away with it." Of course in the end Hickey falls apart but he's so much more heroic and tragic than a total failure like Willy Loman. Another thing I really loved about this play was how young Parrit hates h [...]

Welcome to Harry’s bar, filled to the brim with desolate, disillusioned patrons clinging to their pipe dreams, their hopes that tomorrow, after all, will be another day. The play opens with the patrons sitting around in a drunken stupor. We are introduced to the various types: Rocky, the bartender; Larry Slade, the protagonist who has given up on his pipe dream and awaits his exit from life; Parritt, a rebel anarchist; Willie, a failed law student; Harry Hope, proprietor of the bar; Watjoen an [...]

33-The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (Play-Physical) 5* Welcome to the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or if your the playwright Eugene O'Neill enter his created world of Harry Hope's Saloon and Boarding House or better stated Bar and Flop House where the cast of characters, of which there are quite a number of them are spending their yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's lost in an alcoholic haze in forgetting their broken pipe dreams. If misery loves company pull up a chair, down some rot gut [...]

How jaded must I be? Chronic, neighborhood violence, damn! What kind of civilization cultivates a man that can read The Iceman Cometh and contemptuously think, ‘murder, that’s it; confessed and taken away? Okay, 3-stars?’ Use an RSS feed for your local news, watch the impresarios of late night comedy, see the plea deals that defile our legal system—you’ll know common, felony violence perpetrated across class, gender and age for senseless reasons that cheapen lives. It’s from this pos [...]

The Iceman Cometh is noted for its dark realism; its setting and characters closely resemble real life. The world of the play is a cruel place. Despair is a constant presence, love only an illusion, and death something to which one looks forward. Relief comes in alcohol and pipe dreams—groundless hopes for a future that will never arrive.The play seems too dark and despairing to bear but stay with it It doesn't get any less depressing but there is much interesting philosophy along the journey [...]

This play concerns a saloon/rooming house and the alcoholics who live there. They sit around, reminiscing about the better days and their big plans to get their lives started, all of them anxiously awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a salesman who comes by once a year to blow a lot of money on them and throw a birthday party for Harry, the owner of the saloon.It's a great play and one of the best ever written, in my opinion. The setting, dialogue, and characters might seem a bit dated, but the actu [...]

This sad saga chronicles a group of drunks who meet up at a local saloon. They are full of big dreams for the future, but anyone who knows them knows that they are all talk and no action. Each man has glossed over the story of his life in his own mind, leaving out the bad bits and chalk any failures up to someone else’s fault or a tragedy that befell him. The patrons look up to a salesman named Hickman ("Hickey") who stops in when he can. During the first half of the play everyone gathers at t [...]

This is one of the richest plays, symbolically, of modern American theater. But like most if not all O'Neill plays, it is as interesting to read as it is to see on the stage. Lots of other plays of this era that are heavy on symbolism rely on the visual cues of the production to bring the meaning through, and therefore can seem remote and boring when reading them. (Unless you're a director perhaps, and particularly trained to read plays with an inner eye for staging them.) O'Neill really uses th [...]

Honestly, this play moves me in so many ways that I really want to give it a 5 star rating, except for the fact that in many cases it is dreadfully, irredeemably overwritten.I tried to watch the movie which could boast of having Jason Robards and Robert Redford in it, but I got bored to death after the first 45 mins or so. I hate to say it but this one seems to be much much better when read privately rather than performed. No slight to O'Neill, at least in terms of his writing (it could have bee [...]

Wow.talk about despair! It's in every movement of this play. Harry's bar & rooming house is the last stop for a rag-tag group of alcoholics. There's nowhere for them to go; they've reached rock bottom. As we hear of each of their pasts, it's so sad to know that their lives once held promise and it slipped away.Along comes Hickey who tries to show them that they can break out of their pattern, return to their old lives. He tries to give them hope. But, even as they try, it's hopeless. How can [...]

*4.5Four or five, five or fourI went back and forth for awhile and finally came to a decision. I was worried it'd be all that I couldn't stand in a play - too many characters, overly predictable, far too fast-pacedd I'd have been sad, but O'Neill does not disappoint. The characters were all clear, the New York accent was well-written and not overly distracting, the set is clear and I can easily picture it all. It's actually quite motivational, as well as being very depressing. Odd juxtaposition, [...]

This is the first O'Neill play I've read, which is a shame being that he did much of his work in my hometown and we share a birthday. But I digressThe Iceman Cometh is depressing, resonant, and sadly realistic and relatable. The only thing that made me not give it five stars is that the dialogs can get pretty tired and unnatural feeling. Everyone responding to things in chorus is symbolic, but is unnecessary and becomes overused.

I hate Eugene O'Neill's writing style. His dialogue is so stilted, it's impossible to believe it. However, his plotlines are smart, and I like the charcters he creates, particularly here.

It's all in de game. (Cora, Act V)It's all in the game.All in the game, yo.

I registered a book at BookCrossing!BookCrossing/journal/12983988

You think you know dark? THINK AGAIN. You think you know hopelessness? THINK AGAIN. You think you know depressing? THINK AGAIN.

In 1998, I had the pleasure to see one of American theater’s great dramas, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, staged at one of the grand old theater houses of London’s West End, the Old Vic, where Kevin Spacey was then headlining in the role of doomed interventioner (and erstwhile salesman) Theodore “Hickey” Hickman. I’ve reread the play a couple times over the years, including this past week. This most recent reading uncovered some of the plays more deeply held pleasures—well, [...]

I wasn't crazy about the play, considering how much hype it gets. It's frequently referred to in a lot of shows, movies and books, but I wasn't super into it.For starters, it's really, really long (240 pages!) It's centered around a bunch of drunkards in a bar whose lives are in shambles. What it does do, though, that I particularly liked, was show how their lives are in pieces because they live in a fantasy world where "there's always tomorrow" and "death is imminent", so why bother?They live i [...]

Very good. I saw the play at BAM. Like 5 hours long. Was way in the back. It was very good. Though, I can't say I could tell you what it was exactly about. So I decided to read it to see what I was missing. I was missing a lot. Actually, some things I might have missed or just forgot that it happened. But I am glad that I read it because. Ow I have a clearer idea what the play is about and what exactly happens in it. For example, I remember clearly the way Parritt would always speak to Larry as [...]

There's something not quite psychologically sound in this O'Neill epic about a barroom of drunks forced to give up their pipe dreams by a glad-handing salesman who has a dark secret of his own but the playwright's scope is so wide and his ambition so great that I still admired the work even if I had to constantly make concessions regarding motivations and reactions. I don't doubt that O'Neill knows the pull of liquor but you feel his presence like the hand of God pushing characters from one scen [...]

Amazing play - constantly there are these emotional ups and downs. The things people say to one another, so hurtful, then a shared drink, and all if forgiven - or is it? A sad, amazing and memorable play- set (supposedly) in New London's Dutch Tavern, which is 20 minutes from my home. What happens when your are stripped of your dreams and forced to live in reality? Can anyone be happy with just the here and now?

A depressingly awful look at people in self-imposed purgatory. People too afraid to live yet even more afraid to die. A purgatory whipped up from a damning combination of booze and pipe dreams. Many interesting characters that make up a large cast. Hickman's story is both heartrending and devastating. Recommend, albeit reluctantly.