The Iceman Cometh Read Free Page A

and Slade does not understand that he has not been converted to any sense of death, at all. His only strength would be in emulating Hickey’s tragic awareness between right and right, but of course without following Hickey into violence: “I’ll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die!” That vision of the two sides, with compassion, is the only hope worthy of the dignity of any kind of tragic conception. O’Neill ended by exemplifying Yeats’s great apothegm: he could embody the truth, but he could not know it.

Characters

    HARRY HOPE, proprietor of a saloon and rooming house *

    ED MOSHER, Hope’s brother-in-law, one-time circus man *

    PAT MCGLOIN, one-time Police Lieutenant *

    WILLIE OBAN , a Harvard Law School alumnus *

    JOE MOTT , one-time proprietor of a Negro gambling house

    PIET WETJOEN (“ THE GENERAL ”),

    one-time leader of a Boer commando *

    CECIL LEWIS (“ THE CAPTAIN”),

    one-time Captain of British infantry *

    JAMES CAMERON (“ JIMMY TOMORROW ”),

    one-time Boer War correspondent *

    HUGO KALMAR, one-time editor of Anarchist periodicals

    LARRY SLADE, one-time Syndicalist-Anarchist *

    ROCKY PIOGGI , night bartender *

    DON PARRITT *

    CHUCK MORELLO, day bartender *
    THEODORE HICKMAN ( HICKEY ), a hardware salesman
    MORAN
    LIEB
    * Roomers at Harry Hope’s.

Act One
    SCENE
    The back room and a section of the bar of HARRY HOPE’S saloon on an early morning in summer, 1912. The right wall of the back room is a dirty black curtain which separates it from the bar. At rear, this curtain is drawn back from the wall so the bartender can get in and out. The back room is crammed with round tables and chairs placed so close together that it is a difficult squeeze to pass between them. In the middle of the rear wall is a door opening on a hallway. In the left corner, built out into the room, is the toilet with a sign “ This is it ” on the door. Against the middle of the left wall is a nickel-in-the-slot phonograph. Two windows, so glazed with grime one cannot see through them, are in the left wall, looking out on a backyard. The walls and ceiling once were white, but it was a long time ago, and they are now so splotched, peeled, stained and dusty that their color can best be described as dirty. The floor, with iron spittoons placed here and there, is covered with sawdust. Lighting comes from single wall brackets, two at left and two at rear .
    There are three rows of tables, from front to back. Three are in the front line. The one at left-front has four chairs; the one at center-front, four; the one at right-front, five. At rear of, and half between, front tables one and two is a table of the second row with five chairs. A table, similarly placed at rear of front tables two and three, also has five chairs. The third row of tables, four chairs to one and six to the other, is against the rear wall on either side of the door .
    At right of this dividing curtain is a section of the barroom, with the end of the bar seen at rear, a door to the hall at left of it. At front is a tab le with four chairs. Light comes from the street windows off right, the gray subdued light of early morning in a narrow street. In the back room , LARRY SLADE and HUGO KALMAR are at the table at left-front , HUGO in a chair facing right , LARRY at rear of table facing front, with an empty chair between them. A fourth chair is at right of table, facing left . HUGO is a small an in his la te fifties. He has a head much too big for his body, a high forehead, crinkly long b la ck hair streaked with gray, a square face with a pug nose, a walrus mustache, black eyes which peer near-sightedly from behind thick-lensed spectacles, tiny hands and feet. He is dressed in threadbare black clothes and his white shirt is frayed at collar and cuffs, but everything about him is fastidiously clean. Even his flowing Windsor tie is neatly tied. There is a foreign atmosphere about him, the stamp of an