Sometimes you don’t realize an unlikely combination will work until you try it. Chocolate and salt: Who knew?
Same goes for the casting of Nathan Lane — one of his generation’s most brilliant comic actors — in “The Iceman Cometh,” Eugene O’Neill’s epic drama of rotten lives and crushed ambitions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but when you see the Goodman Theatre production that just opened at BAM, it makes total sense.
Lane plays the key role of Theodore “Hickey” Hickman, a jovial salesman whose occasional visits to a Greenwich Village bar light up the resident drunks’ pathetic lives. At first glance Hickey’s a jolly good fellow — you can see why he’d be good at selling — but this is the kind of show where darkness seeps into everybody and everything. And that starts with the watering hole itself, where the entire play, set in 1912, takes place.
When we first see it, the dive is in shadows, its patrons asleep, or in alcohol-induced semi-comas, at the tables. This is the “No Chance Saloon,” regular Larry (Brian Dennehy) says. “The End of the Line Cafe, the Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller.”
The owner’s named Harry Hope (the excellent Stephen Ouimette), a bitter irony since the men who hang out there have given up on it. Wallowing in self-pity and anger, those “foolosophers” bloviate endlessly: Having nothing to say has never stopped a drunk from talking.
When the gang’s beloved Hickey finally turns up, though, he has shattering news: He’s gone sober. This has a devastating impact on his pals, and O’Neill is especially good at showing what happens when someone in a tight-knit group dares to change.
There’s no getting around it: “The Iceman Cometh” is hard to take. The show rambles on for close to five hours, and is packed with so much repetitive dialogue that you may feel like renaming it “The Iceman Boreth.”
Sometimes you dream of a more radical staging, as when the Wooster Group had a woman in blackface play the title role of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.”
Still, this production is as good as a straightforward production gets.
In each of the four acts, Kevin Depinet’s set reveals a new aspect of the bar, while lighting designer Natasha Katz finds poetry in murk.
Director Robert Falls’ superb cast is led by Lane, hitting the sweet spot between pretend perkiness and self-loathing, and Dennehy, who seems to have completed his transformation into a block of granite. Thanks to both stars and the ensemble, at least you’re looking at the stage instead of your watch.