Name: The Iceman Cometh
ISBN: 9780739404881

Eugene O'Neill

A play about people who have been battered by life, who have done shocking things according to glib, conventional standards of respectability.

A Play

The Iceman Cometh

"We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality. . . . Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion."--from the foreword by Harold Bloom The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams. Eugene O'Neill--the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in literature--completed Iceman 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. Since then, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature; many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama.

Maureen

I loved her so much she could make me believe anything.... I could see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love. Love always won."

***

Extreme procrastination: read the entirety of this overnight. The only consolation is that it was a really good play—packed with a plot twist I never saw coming.

The Iceman Cometh A Play

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