Agon of the Sad Cafe

By T.E. Kalem

THE ICEMAN COMETH by EUGENE O'NEILL

Man lives by illusion, dies by reality. So sayeth O'Neill. The derelicts in Harry Hope's bar come from all of life's fallen ranks -army officers, Harvard men, journalists, pimps and floozies.

Their only hope lies in alcoholic pipe-dreams. Their fondest desire is a visit from Hickey, a gladhanding traveling salesman who conjures inexplicable laughter out of the barflies' brimming cups with the tale of how his lonely wife is finding sexual solace with an iceman.

This time Hickey has changed. He is off the booze and wants to save the in mates of the cafe with a gospel of dis illusionment. They are to test their pipe dreams in the outer world and come to uncompromising terms with themselves.

The experiment is a disaster, leading to hate, fear, anguish and despair. The "iceman" is really death, and Hickey is unmasked as having murdered his wife.

In the current staging at Manhat tan's Joseph E. Levine-Circle in the Square Theater, Iceman holds the play goer in the vise of O'Neill's passions and obsessions, but -the drama's organic life is stunted. Except for Hickey, Iceman 's characters tend to be puppets who are twitched to demonstrate the central the sis. James Earl Jones' Hickey is over wrought, a manic-morose evangelist given to fits of hysterical joviality. In a production not conspicuously endowed with strength or cohesiveness, Jones' prizefighter style makes him disconcert ingly and divisively strong, as if a born winner had stumbled into the company ofbornlosers.

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