Broadway director George C. Wolfe on Eugene O'Neill and the strange music of "The Iceman Cometh"

Five-time Tony Award winning playwright and director George C. Wolfe shares the story behind his sizzling new Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh,” in which Academy Award winner Denzel Washington plays Hickey, the mysterious traveling salesman who drives a barroom full of drunks in 1912 New York into a dizzying downward spiral.

Wolfe's production has garnered eight Tony Award nominations, including one for Wolfe's direction and one for star Denzel Washington.

Wolfe stopped by Salon's studio recently to discuss the challenges of mounting a classic revival, O'Neill's career and style, the incantatory nature of the language in this play, and seeing Tony Kushner's groundbreaking "Angels in America," for which Wolfe won a directing Tony in 1993, be revived on Broadway as well. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve tackled a lot of different kinds of theatre and plays, classic, modern, contemporary. I know that you’ve directed Shakespeare. I imagined you’ve dealt with Ancient Greek drama, and created new plays. How much have you done of those sort of bedrock, big American plays? I was wondering if "Iceman" was a slight departure for you?

"Iceman" is a slight departure. I normally don’t like doing revivals because I figure . . . always when I do a play there’s got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you’re working on a new play, it’s like, how the hell do I do this, and do we have the time? All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you’re doing a revival, I went, well, somebody’s already solved it.

What do I have to offer for it? But then, at one point, Denzel was interested in coming back to Broadway, which he regularly does, which I’m really glad because he’s just a brilliant actor and it’s really nice that there’s a person who has an incredibly vibrant and vital film career who is dedicated and deeply invested in doing theatre. After series of conversations, he made a commitment to do "Iceman."

I got inside of it and I went, there is potential for failure all over the place. Let me jump on board. It was fascinating to me because I found myself inside of it by accident, in someway. I was going to like OK, I think I can be smart about this.

Then, as you get inside of it, you go, “Oh my God, his language is extraordinary. He writes this incredibly brilliant, what I call tribal speak of New York and it’s stunning.” When you read it, you don’t get it and then when you start to animate it, it’s extraordinary.

I ended up finding myself in love.

Talk about the character of Hickey, who Denzel Washington plays in this production. Who is he? Where does he come from? What does he mean in this show?

Well, Hickey is an incredibly dynamic, charismatic door to door salesman.

He’s stuck inside of this marriage where perfection and honesty and purity of thought is expected of him. He is not that, nor is anyone.

To escape that, every year he shows up for about a month and he gets clustered out of his mind for a month and then he leaves there and goes back to his life and to his marriage and to his work. Except for this time, when he shows up, he’s clicked to this thought process that he’s going to rescue everybody from all of their illusions and he’s going to have this crash course in confrontation of self because he’s had an epiphany.

It seems to anticipate all kinds of things about self help psychology.

Exactly, exactly.

They must have existed somewhat in the American character, but you didn’t have Tony Robbins in 1912 –

I know, exactly, exactly, exactly.

You didn’t even have Dale Carnegie yet, I don’t think –

Exactly, exactly. No. You didn’t have A.A.

Right, right.

But he’s on a mission to solve everybody’s life and he needs to do it in a finite amount of time.

This guy traditionally has been the life of the party, right?

Yes. Exactly, exactly. He brings joy and drunkenness and foolishness and no sense of responsibility, and all of a sudden, I’m going to change you instantly.

You’re going to be better because I now understand what that means and what that means is living your life without any illusions, without any bullshit, without any fake promises of what you’re going to do tomorrow. Confront your limitations. Confront the shallowness of the pressure that you put on yourself and you will be free.

This is a dangerous possibility for any of us, isn’t it?

To all of us, exactly. I mean, it sounded like what is that correct proportion of truth than lie that we need to live with.

Because if it’s too much one way or the other, we’re screwed.

Because — I don’t know about you — I don’t actually spend all day drinking, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have illusions.

Precisely. Exactly and that’s how we wake up in the morning. It’s like, OK, I’m going to solve everything today and you’ll end up solving one inch of the depth of what you want to solve.

In watching Denzel Washington, his extraordinary performance as Hickey in "The Iceman Cometh," I never actually asked myself whether the character as he was playing him was white or black. Is that in the ballpark of what you guys were going for? Or how did you approach that question? Because you can read the play and say, well, there’s some evidence that he’s probably a white guy from context and there is in fact, of course, interestingly for 1912, a black character in the play, where race is very specifically a part of this story.

Race is very specifically and white privilege is discussed in an incredibly, ridiculously sophisticated way. At one point, the character Joe Mott says to two of his friends, Joe Mott, his illusion that he’s going to open up this gambling joint and he says show up and I’ll treat you white.

If you win that’s gold, and then if you lose it don’t count, can’t treat you any whiter than that. Which is incredibly sophisticated thinking for Eugene O’Neill to have in 1944 about a character in 1912.

But interestingly enough, that is the definition of white. And one point earlier on the character says, when he tries to open up his… back in time when he tried to open up his gambling institution, he goes to this man whose part of the [0:07:53 inaudible] machine and he says, you know, you black son of a bitch, you better be white . . .

And that context is you better pay the bribes that we all pay.

If you play the game, you’re white.

Hickey shows up and Denzel is a black man. He’s going to be a black man on stage, but he shows up with money. He shows up with possibilities and he’s connected to the world in a way that none of them are. They’re given the advantage point that they are looking at the world which is from the bottom up. He’s a star.

I think that when somebody is buying a series of people who are drunks free liquor for two weeks to two months, I really don’t thing race is going to be a part of their conversation.

They're going to select to not observe his color at one point.

One hundred percent. But color — [the] color white is possibility.

One of the things that I think O’Neill does which I think is really brilliant, with Joe Mott but with all the characters that went there, three women and the character who are prostitutes, is that he get some access to their rage. Which is a really astonishing thing.

Because if you look for comparable movies, if you look at anything that Hollywood was producing in 1944, it’s no where near what these characters are allowed to have and what they’re allowed to express.

Interestingly enough he said it in 1912, because 1912 was a very monumental year for him.

He tried to commit suicide. He travelled to Buenos Aires. He acquired a neural disease from a prostitute. He became a writer. He decided he was going to invest in becoming a writer, Eugene O’Neill did. It was a transformational year and he spent a tremendous amount of time living at two rooming houses which were connected to bars — the Golden Swan, which was on 6th Avenue and Jimmy the Priest, which was on Fulton, where the site of the World Trade Center was, and it was torn down for that.

He said really fascinatingly, and his father was a very, very, very famous and very successful actor, living in those places taught him to not judge anyone.

It gave birth not only to him as an artist, but I think expanded his definition of himself as a human being on the planet.

Well, that’s very interesting because in watching the play I was sort of identifying the character that David Morris plays — who by the way is fantastic, I’m so glad to see that he got a Tony nomination. But I sort of identified David Morris’ character as maybe being the authorial voice or stand-in, but maybe it’s the younger guy too, Parritt.

O’Neill does a really interesting thing. There’s a relationship between Parritt, the young kid, and Hickey. You know that they are both haunted by the past. One speaks very specifically. Hickey does about his father and never mentions a word about his mother and he’s haunted by the mother. Together they are a collective person in some respects and [the question they explore is] that can you escape? Can you escape the pain of your past? Can you escape your legacy and redefine you? The young kid is defined by a very, very powerful of mother who is committed to a cause and not at all the least be committed to him.

It’s really fascinating just the range of characters and the range of many women that are presented in, in this play. It’s such an incredibly expansive and sophisticated brain that’s working, and at 1944.

Obviously, this was something that you and your cast worked on very hard, but for a play that was written 70 years ago or so, I was really startled to feel how contemporary it felt in terms of the issues. You just mentioned the political element that comes up, which is something that recurs in America likely. The elements of race and ethnicity that come up. As a comment on masculinity, which is a very contemporary topic.

Absolutely. Totally it is. It’s out. It was also interesting to me that he wrote it very late in his career and he followed this by “Long Days Journey into Night," which is his most intimate play.

But this is also astonishingly intimate too.

And he sets them both in 1912. Interestingly or not.

Interesting. He was about 24 or something in 1912. That's quite a young man.

Yeah, very young man. Very young. Very young.

But the stuff about how to function as a man and how to relate to women, there’s even weirdly a kind of a #MeToo subject to this play —

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because these issues, because frighteningly or brutally, we go on a journey and we end up back at the same the place.

We’re evolve. We’re clear. We have that nowhere not. We broke and thrill. Everything is better, no it’s not.

You know what I mean and I think they’re because I think that’s the character of the American psyche because we figure out, and one of the things that I think is really interesting is Hickey is trying to do something that in its own way is incredibly powerful, which is confront the truth.

He’s trying to do it at a rate and an intensity that is impossible for any fragile human being to process, but he is trying to look truthfully, and O’Neill is trying to look truthfully, at what’s going on and what’s happening. And we frequently rewrite history as the characters do at the end of the play.

We bury the truth and rewrite history so that we don’t have to take any responsibility for events that happen.

It’s an incredibly sophisticated thing that we all do. Yeah, well, but I wasn’t and yeah, well, but I know, but still. We all play that game on ourselves. We play the game on ourselves, individually, and we set play within the politics and the racial and sexual and gender identity reality of America. Yeah, I understand, but.

One of the things that struck me, I think we now gotten to the point where we don’t necessarily think of these so-called realist American plays — thinking for example of O’Neill, of Arthur Miller, of Tennessee Williams. We don’t think of them as just realistic. They have another dimension to them. I felt like you were playing with that it at times.

I very much [was]. I read this quote of the original designer of "The Iceman Cometh," and he said, “Realism is the thing we do when we don’t go quite up to that extra effort.” That quote, it exploded my brain.

[O'Neill] was experimenting with form and so there’s this kind of fallacy which I really resent . . . that he evolved. That all of that was experimentation and now he finally became a mature artist with "The Iceman Cometh." No, my contention is all that experimentation of form, of style, is all present in "Iceman Cometh." It’s all there.

What’s also interesting in the year 1912, he was forced to marry this woman because of the fame of his father. And in order to get into a divorce, you had to prove infidelity. He went to a whore house which was right across the street, at that time it was across the street from the Lyceum Theatre, picked out a woman, went upstairs, after an hour invited his lawyer and her lawyer up to witness them in bed so that therefore infidelity could be proven. He then went the next day, expecting money from his father and never received it. And then he tried to commit suicide.

Then, a period later, he then went on tour with his father who was performing the Count of Monte Cristo in Vaudeville. Those Vaudeville union rhythms desperation of young man wanting the approval of his parents, who try to kill himself, who was forced to exposed himself to all of that is inside of this play. He didn’t set it 1944. He set it in 1912 which is not only an expression of the time period, but anexpression of who he was at the time.

He was a person. The writer was a person searching for an identity and that rambunctiousness and that volatility of trying to figure out who you are is built into the play. And so stylistically all of that is in the play.

I didn’t want to entomb the play — and I do mean that in a literal sense — in these walls and in a heavy handed realism. It’s been done that way and done that way beautifully, but I was intrigued by what happens to the language. What happens to these souls when they are allowed to breathe in a space where you’re not completely always? You’re watching true emotions but you aren’t unnecessarily always watching realistic behavior.

These are loaded terms, but there’s something almost incantatory ritualistic in this production.

Yes. One hundred percent.

I was struck by the similarity, and I may know it from your European folk tales but I think, every single tradition has the tale of the devil or the trickster or the demigod, where the trickster figure comes to town with a message which is a very ambiguous message. That is kind of what the story is, right?

Exactly. It’s very much so, very much so. It’s really interesting that you picked up that particular trait of incantation because it is to me, it’s symphonic.

It’s emotionally and linguistically symphonic. There are these recurring themes . . . how people’s language and how people tell one story one way and they repeat the story another way and then they tell the story the third time, and what's shifting are the stakes in the desperation behind it. But so there are these recurring linguistic and musical motifs and what of the things that’s really fascinating it was trying to figure out the music if you will of each act because it’s very, very different.

Also, I wanted to try to craft the space so that it was also very different and you’re watching the frailty of the human condition served up to you. A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and at the same time to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

That’s marvelously put. I was struck by the fact that Hickey seems to be able to hear what people say about him when he’s not on stage.

I’ve never noticed that end of tale before. I do want to ask you one question before we close about something else which is a play that you were intimately associated, “Angels in America." It’s back on Broadway for first time since you were the director of it in the '90s, right? You must have emotions about gladness, a sense of disconnection, the fact that it’s your baby.

Well, all of that. I mean, all of that. There’s an incredible sense of pride. There’s an incredibly shallow sense of why are you dating someone else? You love only me. But at the same time, there is majesty in the words.

There is majesty in the words and the next generation of clueless, or not so evolved people you need to pass in that majesty.

At the end of the day, the best part of me goes, I’m glad it’s here and I’m really thrilled that people are going there and experiencing its power and its command and its truth.

I’m really thrilled about that, but it was an extraordinary journey to work on that play. On the opening night, I think I walked on stage with a cane, because I had gout, because I was beaten the hell up by it.

I remember it, we played at the Walter Kerr Theatre and any time I went into the Walter Kerr Theatre for at least three years after . . .  it was like . . .  I’m back at the scene of the crime.

At the same time, I worked with an astonishing group of actors, an astonishing group of wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, actors. I received Part One ["Millennium Approaches"] as sacred text. And then Part Two ["Perestroika"], I think three or four days prior to going into rehearsal, I got five new acts into the course of the rehearsal process, and two-thirds of those five new acts changed.

But then, there are days where Tony [Kushner, the playwright] would go "I wrote this thing," and you read and it’s the character of Belize’s vision of heaven that he says to Roy Cohn. And it's exquisite writing. I was in that room the moment the first time those words were said. And that lives inside of you in a perpetually intense, raw, lovely extraordinary way. And at the exact same time it’s like and now and your job as helping to give birth to it is done. Now, it’s out in the world and people are experiencing it. That’s thrilling. That really is thrilling.