Dionysus in The Iceman Cometh

DIONYSUS IN THE ICEMAN COMETH IN 1926, thirteen years before he wrote The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill completed Lazarus Laughed. Since a commercial production would have involved great expense on top of the text's many technical difficulties , it was the only play of his never to be done in the professional theater. The reason for both the difficulties and expense was its underlying aesthetic idea, which O'Neill had derived years before from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. There had been other influences as well. But it had been primarily through Nietzsche that he had come to understand the theater as ideally a place of religious experience, a temple where rituals were enacted celebrating the mystery of human life. In this sense the idea meant creating a drama equivalent in the modem theater to that of the Greeks in the ancient Athenian. In Lazarus Laughed he tried to realize this equivalent in wholly Nietzschean terms. Just as the ritualistic form was inspired by Nietzsche through The Birth of Tragedy, so was the philosophical content through Thus Spake Zarathustra. The result was what he called "A Play For An Imaginative Theatre."l Although it soon became obvious that the professional theater was a world apart from the "Imaginative," he apparently thought of the play for many years as the best thing he had ever done. And it seems that the writing of The Iceman Cometh in 1939 was essentially a transposition of Lazarus Laughed into an idiom suitable for the New York stage, though one which in a subtle way was no less Dionysian. O'Neill wrote two letters to Barrett Clark in 1944 about a revision of Lazarus Laughed, which he still had hopes of getting the Theatre Guild to do. This was five years after he had completed The Iceman Cometh. Yet it is likely that he had already thought of revising the former when he conceived of the latter. In such a case the idea of writing something entirely new in the exact same dimensions as a revised Lazarus Laughed might easily have occurred to him. The later play is distinct from the earlier in its naturalistic setting and pessimistiC mood, but in its action and main characters it appears to have been completely derived . The various cuts he suggested to Clark at this time for Lazarus Laughed had evidently led himfive years before to The Iceman Cometh. In The Iceman Cometh he expressed a hopeless despair of life, an outlook quite different from that expressed in Lazarus Laughed. It was probably this change in outlook which motivated him to write a whole 1. LaZIJrua Laughed (New York, 1927), title page. 377 378 MODERN DRAMA February new play instead of just revising the old. In addition, new material was insistently at hand in his still vivid impressions of Jimmy the Priest's and the Hell Hole, saloons like Harry Hope's in the play, and some of the people he had met there and elsewhere in the early days. However, O'Neill's main concern was always aesthetic rather than philosophic or autobiographical. He was not so much interested in philosophizing or reminiscing about life in The Iceman Cometh as. in celebrating the very fact of life itself. As in Lazarus Laughed his purpose was to offer up an image of life as he saw it for embodiment in a ritual act. In1932 he had described the "Imaginative 'Theatre" as a legitimate descendant of the first theatre that sprang, by virtue of man's imaginative interpretation of life, out of his worship of Dionysus ... a theatre returned to its highest and sole significant function as a Temple where the religion 01 a poetical interpretation and symbolical celebration of life is communicated to human beings , starved in spirit by their soul-stifling daily struggle to exist as masks among the masks of livingl2 The Iceman Cometh with all its hopeless despair was intended to provide the same kind of aesthetic experience in the theater as Lazarus Laughed with its ecstatic acceptance. Accordingly, it should be considered less as a philosophic statement than as a religious communion. And for this reason it is best seen in its relation...