Brian Dennehy

Dennehy: Too pessimistic to be a tragedy? [Moderator: Did everybody hear that?] It’s a very good question, and here’s why. Can you write tragedy…can you write tragedy if there’s not, in the context of a tragedy, an alternative way for the hero to go which would make it a success and him a success? In other words, if you start out by saying, “There is no hope, there can never be any hope—all effort is folly, all is vanity,” is it possible that that could be a tragedy? For example, Hamlet, you know, Hamlet could have done things another way. He could have just run off. Brilliant man, smart man, understanding the futility of his actions, did it anyway. There are some people who would say—that is the definition of a tragedy. Whereas, with O’Neill, especially in Iceman Cometh, when essentially you have the group that remains, celebrating the fact that they have been given their illusory life back again, they have been given their illusions back again, most of which is fueled, of course, by booze, and they’re celebrating the fact that they are not only moving towards the abyss, but they’re leaping into it as quickly as possible, that that can’t be a tragedy, because there is no possibility of any other conclusion. Is that essentially what you are asking?

Audience: Yes, I think that, I don’t share his view, but I was wondering if…what you…I think, for example, that the end of The Iceman Cometh where the people come back as a community is in a sense an image of harmony very much akin to O’Neill’s feeling of a harmony beyond this Earth, which…

Dennehy: Oh no, but it’s a terrible harmony. There’re in the bar, and poor old Hickey [Theodore “Hickey” Hickman, the protagonist of The Iceman Cometh], whose been trying to get them to see the error of their ways, that he’s discovered, he’s discovered the secret of happiness, and the secret of happiness was, in Hickey’s case, to kill his wife. For her own good. Because he looked at her, and he said, “All I’m doing is making her, every time, I make her unhappy, I make her unhappy, but if I kill her, she won’t be unhappy anymore.” He says, “Listen guys, I found the secret of happiness.” And when they hear this story, obviously, they can’t wait to get another drink. So when the cops come in and take him away, they are celebrating the fact that they have been allowed to be the alcoholic, disastrous bums that they really want to be. Can that possibly be a tragedy, because what alternative, what positive alternative can there be? If there is no positive alternative, it’s all just dark.

I mean, if we get to the point in New York where this thing will actually happen, I’m gonna do two one-act plays, which we did in Stratford, Ontario. It was very successful—Hughie, which is a play very much, by O’Neill, very much like what we’ve been talking about, and of course, the audience sees the Hughie and they take an act break, and they all look at each other and say, “Wow, that’s just…jeez that Eugene O’Neill, boy, he’s really… it’s dark.” And then we do [Samuel Beckett’s] Krapp’s Last Tape, which makes Hughie look like a vaudeville act.