Review: In an Energized 'Iceman,' the Drinks are on Denzel

If you have a good time at a production of “The Iceman Cometh,” does that mean the show hasn’t done its job? I was beaming like a tickled 2-year-old during much of George C. Wolfe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s behemoth barroom tragedy, which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with Denzel Washington more than earning his salary as its commanding star.

A sustained grin may not seem an apt response to a play in which desperate, drunken denial is the given existential condition, and suicide and murder are presented as perfectly reasonable life choices for anyone who sees the world clearly. Besides, to smile through nearly four hours of doomed, rotgut-soaked souls mouthing the same hopeless blather over and over again would appear to be courting lockjaw, if not temporary insanity.

Surely, the more appropriate and customary behavior for an “Iceman” audience member would echo that of the play’s cynic-in-chief, a disenchanted socialist (played here with ashen anger by David Morse), who says, “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”

But who’s going to feel like nodding off, or slump into terminal angst, when Mr. Wolfe has filled the stage with such delectably seasoned hams, who lap up limelight the way their characters throw back booze? In addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Morse, this “Iceman” boasts a fine rogue’s gallery of performers who gladden the heart whenever they show up on a New York stage, including Colm Meaney, Bill Irwin, Danny McCarthy, Tammy Blanchard, Neal Huff, Reg Rogers, Michael Potts and Frank Wood.

The denizens of Harry Hope’s last-chance bar in the downtown Manhattan of 1912 (that’s the wonderful Mr. Meaney as the crankily sentimental Harry) are such a scrappy, funny, madly posturing crew that you may not even share their impatience for the Big Guy to show up. That’s Theodore Hickman, known to his pals as Hickey, who is portrayed by Mr. Washington, this production’s Oscar- and Tony-winning star, and its commercial raison d’être.

Hickey, a traveling salesman and perennial life of the party, doesn’t make his entrance until nearly an hour into show. The other characters, who had so eagerly awaited his arrival, wind up hostile to and disappointed with their usually inebriated pal, who has dared to go on the wagon and be really, really serious. Rest assured that you will not feel similarly let down by Mr. Washington’s center-of-gravity performance, or at least not by the play’s conclusion.

Mr. Wolfe’s energetic interpretation of this 1946 drama (which a friend of mind suggested should be retitled “The Iceman Rompeth”) is likely to be divisive. Most productions — including Robert Falls’s acclaimed, Chicago-born version starring Nathan Lane, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015 — tend to elicit adjectives like “searing” and “devastating” (on the positive side) and “narcotic” and “way too long” (on the negative).

After all, this is a work in which life is revealed, none too subtly, to be so crushing that the only way to get through it is to live in a cloud of illusions, or pipe dreams, to use one of O’Neill’s favorite terms. The characters employed to illustrate this point — a group of outcasts and also-rans who hide their heads in whiskey bottles and carefully tended rationalizations — are, as drunks often tend to be, an unbearably garrulous lot.

That means that in addition to being one of the longest of great American plays, “Iceman” is also one of the most repetitive. You pretty much get everything it has to say during the first 20 minutes or so.

O’Neill wasn’t wrong, though, in the self-admiring assessment he made in a 1940 letter to the critic George Jean Nathan, to whom he had sent an early draft. “I feel there are moments in it,” he wrote, “that hit as deeply into the farce and humor and pity and ironic tragedy of life as anything in modern drama.”

Watching this latest incarnation, I laughed more often than I teared up. But this “Iceman” — which has been beautifully designed by Santo Loquasto (the increasingly abstract set), Ann Roth (costumes), Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (the wondrous, color-coded lighting) and sound (Dan Moses Schreier) — acquires its own poignant lyricism, while vividly reminding us that in life, comedy and tragedy are seldom mutually exclusive.

With its heightened performances and tone-poem visuals, this production also clearly elicits the musical nature of “Iceman,” which is in some ways closer to opera or oratorio than it is to conventional drama. On the page, its words can seem as blunt and cipher-like as notes on a musical staff.

It is when you hear them spoken that they spring into interconnected life. All those repeated phrases take on the haunting insistence of melodic motifs. We’re reminded that all of us, no matter how we like to think otherwise, tend to be stuck in a single song of identity, on which we render only slight variations.

The cast members here capture that monotony, to which their characters cling like a security blanket. And they exaggerate it to highly entertaining effect, in their arias and overlapping duets of lamentation and accusation. In fabricating their hopeful visions of their hopeless lives, O’Neill’s barflies are always performing, for themselves as well as the others.

How right it feels that each of the men who have made Harry’s dive and boardinghouse their home — first seen as in a “Last Supper”-like tableau of sleeping figures — should stir to life when a subtle spotlight picks him out. They’re each as enticingly grotesque as a caricature by Goya or Daumier, thanks in part to their distinctively disheveled coifs. (Mia M. Neal did the great and essential hair and wigs.)

I don’t have space to do a full roll call, as Larry Slade (Mr. Morse) does for the benefit of the newest and youngest resident, Don Parritt (the open-faced Austin Butler, in a sensationally assured Broadway debut). But for inhabitants of a place regularly characterized as a morgue, they are an exceptionally vibrant group. They love telling their lies, and these actors (whose profession, after all, is lying) love giving flamboyant life to such falsehoods.

And then good old Hickey shows up, with his toothy smile and goofy jokes. At first, he seems to fit right in, as expected. But since he is portrayed by Mr. Washington, a specialist in layers of feeling, we notice an unsettling, even menacing blankness whenever his face is in repose. You know exactly what Mr. Butler’s character means when he says of Hickey, “There’s something that isn’t human behind his damned grinning and kidding.”

That’s not just because Hickey is on a mission to save his former drinking buddies from their delusions, to make them face reality, as he swears he has done. More than any Hickey I’ve seen (including Kevin Spacey and, Lee Marvin and Jason Robards), Mr. Washington makes us sense that Hickey hasn’t entirely bought his own bill of truth-peddling goods.

Hickey’s long, revelatory monologue at the end of Act III — when he explains the events that turned him from carefree party boy into a cold-sober judge of others — is often delivered as a flashy nervous breakdown to the rest of the cast. In this version, Hickey moves a chair to the edge of the stage and delivers his soliloquy naturalistically, right to us.

As he keeps trying — and failing — to justify himself, a chill creeps over the audience. That’s when I stopped smiling. The party is finally, truly over, and so are the lies within lies. And suddenly Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Washington have slapped us with that mother of all hangovers, which for O’Neill is life itself.