Act One, Pages 7-40
Summary
O’Neill sets his scene – Harry Hope’s No-Chance saloon in New York City, 1912. It is a rundown place with sawdust on the floor, splotched and peeling ceilings, and spittoons everywhere. Tables and chairs cram the space.
O’Neill then provides lengthy descriptions of the men sitting in the chairs, all sleeping except for Larry. There is Hugo, a small man in his 50s with a walrus mustache, thick glasses, and the air of an anarchist radical. Larry Slade is 60 with a gaunt Irish face, smart and sharp blue eyes, and dirty clothes; he has a world-weary expression. Joe Mott is a black man wearing a once-flashy but now-threadbare suit. He has a humorous face marked by a large scar runs down his left cheekbone to the jaw. Piet Wetjoen is a Boer, large and of the Dutch farmer type. Once strong, he is now weak and flabby, though a glimmer of authority remains. James Cameron (“Jimmy Tomorrow”) is about 50. He is clean and has a well-bred face with intelligent eyes, though his hair is thinning and his nose bulbous. His speech is educated and he is very mannered. Cecil Lewis (“The Captain”) is an English former officer about 60 years of age with white hair and a white mustache; he is lean and fastidious. Pat McGloin is paunchy and has the air of a former police officer. His face is good-humored but it was once greedy. Ed Mosher “looks like an enlarged, elderly, bald edition of the village fat boy” (10), but even though he engages in petty swindling, he is largely harmless. Harry Hope, the proprietor, is thin and has the face of an old horse. He is very appealing to everyone and considers himself superior to no one. Willie Oban is in his late thirties and has a haggard disposition. He wears no socks and his feet poke through the holes of his shoes.
When the curtain rises the final man in this early scene enters - Rocky, the night bartender. He is Neapolitan-American, in his late 20s, muscular, and tough but good-natured. He and Larry look at the sleeping Hope, and Rocky grabs a bottle for the two to share.
They good-naturedly complain about Harry’s new commitment to making them pay for their drink and their rent, and Larry smiles that he will be glad to pay tomorrow. There is always hope in tomorrows, and that ship of regrets canceled and promises fulfilled will come in. He tells Rocky not to mock the ship, even if it is looted. After all, pipe dreams give life to the misbegotten men in the world. Rocky asks Larry, who is often called a “Foolosopher” by a friend named Hickey, if he still falls for his pipe dreams. Larry says his are dead and buried.
When Rocky mentions Larry’s anarchist past, Larry swiftly replies that he’s through with the Movement. He shakes Hugo’s shoulder and asks if he’s not telling the truth. Hugo stirs and blearily denounces capitalists and bourgeois swine. He begins to tease and mock Rocky before demanding a drink and slumping back into sleep. Rocky rolls his eyes and says it is good no one takes Hugo seriously. Larry agrees, commenting that they’d been through the Movement together.
Rocky changes the subject to Hugo’s frequent comments about his “slave girls” and explains angrily that he is not a pimp. Margie and Pearl are only there to help him make a little side money; he has a real job as a bartender. Plus, the girls would just throw away their money without him.
Both drink more and talk turns to the imminent arrival of Hickey (Theodore Hickman), the traveling salesman who comes by once a year. Larry is excited for Hickey because he always cheers everyone up. Rocky laughs about the gag Hickey tells about his wife fooling around with the iceman.
As they wonder where Hickey is, Willie stirs and calls out for his Papa. Rocky pities the man because he has nothing and has hit rock bottom. Larry sneers that the pursuit of happiness is the great game.
They watch Willie shouting and stirring in his sleep. He does not wake anyone else up but Rocky shakes him and tells him to be quiet. Hope opens one eye and asks who is yelling. Rocky tells him it is Willie, and Hope replies that he ought to give him a drink and shut him up. Rocky is annoyed, as Hope told him not long ago not to give him any more drinks. Hope hears this and chastises Rocky, grumbling that he never said that and Rocky just wants to cheat him.
Rocky is not offended and winks at Larry, saying he was kidding. Hope is still drowsy and shuts his eye. Willie, wheedling, asks for a drink. Rocky tells him to grab the bottle and Willie quickly downs almost half. Angrily Rocky grabs the bottle back, but Larry counsels Rocky not to be mad at the man. Rocky shrugs and sits down.
Joe is now stirring and asks where Hickey is and what time it is. He slowly says if Hickey isn’t here he’s not going to wake up, but suddenly he jerks up and asks about Parritt, the young man who rented a room last night. Larry tells Joe that Parritt is broke and won’t be buying anyone drinks, but Joe and Rocky says they saw him flash a wad of bills.
This surprises Larry, who explains that he doesn’t actually know Parritt very well. He used to go with his mother, who was arrested in the coast bombing where several people were killed. She will get life in prison, he surmises, and this has made Parritt act strangely. Rocky inquires why Parritt isn’t in jail with his mom but Larry does not know and irritably curses the Movement.
Joe could care less about Parritt and jokes about Anarchists and Socialists, the latter being more appealing because they’re required by their doctrine to share half of what they have.
The door in the hallway opens and Parritt walks in. He is young and good-looking but has an unpleasant, aggressive air about him. His clothes are new and sporty. All the men exchange wary greetings and Parritt states that he could not sleep. Larry tells him to join the other bums and explains that the rules of the house dictate alcohol being served all hours.
When Rocky and Joe look contemptuously at Parritt, he says he knows what they are thinking and pulls out the roll. It is all ones, and all he has to live on. He is defensive, asking why they’d think he made a phony roll. Rocky is cold when he replies that no one said anything. Parritt backs down and laughs lamely, saying he will buy a drink for them.
Joe is pleased, and drinks deeply when he gets the bottle. He then decides to go back to sleep until Hickey arrives, as does Rocky. This leaves only Larry and Parritt. Parritt asks who Hickey is and Larry replies that he is a salesman who comes a couple times a year and blows all his money. He likes this bar because he never sees anyone he knows. Parritt asks what kind of place this is, and Larry sardonically grins that it’s the “No Chance Saloon” where “no one has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go” (25).
Curious, Parritt asks Larry what his pipe dream is. Larry avers that he has none, and abruptly tells Parritt not to complain about this bar. Parritt rushes to say he isn’t, and is happy to escape the business by the Coast. Larry nods that he is safe here.
After a moment Parritt says that it has been quite lonely and he was glad to find Larry. Larry was Mother’s only friend who paid him any attention and he almost seemed to replace his absent Old Man. He apologizes for the mush, but Larry is moved.
Larry wonders why he didn’t get picked up when his Mother did, and Parritt explains that he wasn’t around and hid when he heard about her arrest. Larry muses that it must of been someone in the Movement who tipped them off, and tensely says it bothers him to think who it could be. He then asks Parritt how he found him, and the young man replies that he found the info in his Mother’s letters.
Parritt ventures to ask why Larry left the Movement and if it was because of Mother. This angers Larry, who says even though he may have quarreled with her he left because he realized the Movement was only a beautiful pipe dream. He realized he was not cut out for it and that his ability to see both sides of a question meant it was too hard for him to be fully committed.
Parritt smiles slyly and says his Mother probably thinks it was because of her, then adds that she seems to think she is the Movement. Larry is uncomfortable with this comment but Parritt hastily says he was kidding and it often doesn’t seem like she is really in jail.
He changes the topic and asks what Larry’s been doing since he left, and all Larry grouses is that he does nothing and is a “philosophical drunken bum” (30). With a sharp tone he warns Parritt he has nothing to give him, and quotes bleak lines about death and sleep. Parritt is surprised at first but then smiles that you never know when those lines might come in handy.
For his part, Larry is perturbed by the young man. He casually asks if Parritt has heard any news of his Mother and Parritt responds that he has not. He blurts out that they had fought before she was arrested because he was going on with tarts. He also was over the Movement itself and got wise that it was a pipe dream. He implores Larry to admit he understands how he feels, and though Larry feels sympathy and pity, there is still something about Parritt that bothers him.
Hugo stirs and looks at Parritt and drunkenly calls the young man a stool pigeon. Parritt is angry and raises a fist but Hugo drones on, asking Parritt how his Mother is and where he came from. He promptly falls back asleep.
Parritt is relieved but wonders why Larry is looking at him strangely. He defends himself, saying he would not have actually hit Hugo. A moment later he changes the subject and asks who all these guys are. Larry runs with this and points to Captain Lewis and General Wetjoen, former enemies in the Boer War, and Jimmy Tomorrow. He explains that they do not do anything, live on free lunch and their old friend Harry, but this is all they ask of life. As for Harry, he barely leaves the bar. He used to be an old Tammany politician. Mosher used to work for the circus and McGloin was a police lieutenant in the days of graft but was caught. Joe once ran a "colored" (in parlance of the time) gambling house. Rocky keeps the girls and tends bar.
Willie perks up and asks why he was omitted. He then opines that he came from a famous criminal father, went to Harvard, and studied law. He discovered whiskey, however, and now he is here.
Willie calls Parritt a plutocrat and Parritt is mad people think he has money. Willie turns to Larry and suggests they ignore Parritt and wait for Hickey or death. He begins singing a song he claims to have learned at Harvard and the other drunks stir. Hope fumes while Willie sings of a mariner and a woman. When Rocky grabs him to take him away Willie dissolves into fear and begs him not to take him to the haunted room. Hope relents and tells Rocky to leave Willie alone, but fumes at the men and says there will be no more free drinks.
Analysis
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is widely regarded as the playwright’s masterpiece as well as one of the most complex and brilliant works of American drama. It is a long play, clocking in at around 5 hours in performances. Despite its length, the play takes unfolds in one space and very little by way of traditional plot actually happens. O’Neill also provides incredibly lengthy and detailed character descriptions, stage setup, and stage direction. All of this is the framework for a work in which ideas and character take the proverbial center stage.
Those characters are numerous but have something in common: they tenaciously cling to their “pipe dreams” (ranging from getting jobs back, to being considered a businessman rather than a pimp, officially becoming a lawyer, etc.) as they sit, drink, and sleep away their lives in a derelict West Village bar in 1912. Critic Peter Egri calls the work “a weirdly grotesque and grim tragi-comedy of the simultaneous inevitability of pursuing illusion and facing truth.” The group of men (and prostitutes) is characterized by “broken career, social, intellectual, emotional, and moral stupor” with a second layer of “the lying pipe dream…to build up a castle-in-the-air of an imaginary escape.”
Based on O’Neill’s own depressing and dissolute year of 1912 in which he too frequented such institutions and befriended the so-called dregs of society, the play offers very little in terms of characters or plot traditionally seen as fit for the stage. O’Neill once said, “I knew ‘em all…I’ve known ‘em all for years…The past which I have chosen is one I knew.” In writing the play, he admitted he’d “locked himself in with [his] memories.”
This first part of the first act introduces audiences to nearly all of the characters, but we gain the most insight into Larry and Parritt. Larry doesn’t consider himself like the others. He claims to have gotten rid of his pipe dream long ago. He left the Movement (more on that momentarily) and thus all his dreams are “dead and buried behind me” (12). Around the bar he is affectionately known as the Foolosopher, but he’s not judgmental of everyone else. He laughs about their “touching credulity” and compares their current state of delusion and inebriation to being on a ship: “What’s it matter if the truth is that their favorite breeze has the stink of nickel on its breath, and their sea is a growler of lager and ale, and their ships are long since looted and scuttled and sunk on the bottom?” (12). He is happy to sit on the outside and watch the “great game, the pursuit of happiness” (16). His tone is sardonic, but again, he has more affection than disdain for his peers.
Young Parritt, the son of Larry’s former lover in the Movement, challenges Larry’s complacency. Parritt is an unknown entity, sneering and volatile. Larry has pity for him at first but it becomes clear that Parritt is hiding something; it doesn’t take long for Larry to intuit that the boy turned his Mother in to the authorities for her role in a Movement bombing. Parritt’s opinion of his Mother and upbringing as well as his eventually proffered reasons for turning her in vacillate to say the least. When he talks about her his tone is mostly bitter, and he mentions early on that he finds her to be a hypocrite for getting mad at him going around with tarts while she clearly engages in free love. There is certainly something uncomfortably Oedipal about his obsession with her and her men, an observation that will only strengthen as the play goes on. Parritt claims to be done with the Movement and “got wise it was all a crazy pipe dream!” (32) but early on Larry doesn’t buy it.
In his conversation with the boy, it’s obvious that one of the things that Larry dislikes is being forced to defend his choices. He left the Movement and when Parritt asks why, he grudgingly accounts for coming to a point when he could see both sides of a question and no longer blindly support the cause. His point of view is avowedly nihilistic, for he seems to believe in nothing and think that life is essentially meaningless. As we will come to see by the end of the play, he is frightened by death and by living, which he shouldn’t be if he were a pure nihilist, but at this point he is proud to be “a philosophical drunken bum” (30) who has “nothing left to give” (31) and wants only to be left alone.
The Movement Larry and Parritt refer to is the International Workers of the World (IWW) or the “Wobblies,” an international labor union with philosophical ties to socialism and anarchism. More information can be found in the “Other” section of this study guide. Suffice it to say, for Larry it represents engagement in the outside world. By quitting the Movement he indicates that he has spent his passions, and that he wants to wither away in this bar. This is in contrast to Rosa Parritt, of whom her son comments, “To hear her go on sometimes, you’d think she was the Movement” (30). We never meet the famous “Mother”, but she, like the other women mentioned in the play, stands in contrast to the lifeless drunks of the bar.
