Portrait of a Production
ON AN April afternoon in 1956, the whole company of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square—twenty-two people in all—were sitting in a tight circle in José Quintero’s office above the stage, engaged in our first rehearsal. We had read through three acts of Eugene O’Neill’s play, with Act Four still to come, and we were taking a break. The room was quiet. Two big windows were open to a mild breeze and a distant sausage smell from some joint on West 4th Street. Nobody wanted to talk about the play. Jason Robards, reading the role of Hickey, was sitting by himself, looking at his script. People were staying away from him, the way ballplayers stay away from a pitcher who’s working on a no-hitter. José sat alone, one long leg curled around the leg of his chair. I was worrying about what I needed to do next. I had just been hired as the stage manager on this show, my first job in New York.
The reading was going well, thanks to Jason. At a first rehearsal, actors often don’t want to put too much into it—it’s just a reading. They don’t know yet what the director wants, so it’s better to hold back and just . But Jason kept pulling the actors’ eyes away from their scripts and into the scene. He was kidding and then soothing, teasing and then attacking, always with his edgy laugh. After the break, the reading moved on to the grim final act of the play, where O’Neill had written a very long monologue for this character. At this point Jason closed his script and put it on the floor. He looked around at us and started talking. We weren’t sure what was happening—had he already learned it? He went on without the script, smiling and friendly, and we realized it was Hickey’s speech, about growing up as a preacher’s son in a small town and how much he loved his wife, Evelyn. But as he told the story his eyes grew dark, and José’s little office got darker in that late afternoon. He talked about cheating on Evelyn over and over, and coming home from drunken binges “looking like something that ought to be dead but isn’t,” and giving Evelyn a disease he picked up from a. His pity for his wife kept building, and his anger, and his terrible guilt. He was drowning in it. We couldn’t look at him. He reached a level of grief that none of us had imagined when we read the play. And this was the first read-through.
