Playwright as Hedgehog

Hughie, by Eugene O'Neill. The Greek poet Archilochus said: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Eugene O'Neill was a hedgehog playwright, and the one big thing he knew was this: the truth kills-the lie of illusion nourishes life. O'Neill dealt with this theme long and lovingly in The Iceman Cometh. Then, 23 years ago, he wrote a one-act, 65-minute postlude to that play; Hughie is a kind of Iceman's ice cube. But O'Neill was a stage animal to the theater born, and even his minor efforts are brushes with the lion's paw.

If Hickey the hardware salesman peddled illusions in Iceman, Erie Smith (Jason Robards) the gambler is parched for illusions in Hughie. For more years than he dares to remember, he has been playing against the house, and the house is life. Life plays with stacked cards and loaded dice, and O'Neill, almost alone among U.S. playwrights, can make this simple self-pitying cliche sound like a fresh and bruising truth.

Erie ("I was dragged up in Erie, P-A -some punk burg") has returned to his fleabag hotel one night in 1928, after a five-day mourning binge. Ostensibly, he is grieving for Hughie, the recently deceased night clerk, but actually he grieves for himself. Hughie was Erie's false mirror image, the man who gave him the confidence to see himself as he is not. Hughie was the heaven-sent sucker who believed that Erie was the lovemaster of Ziegfeld Follies girls, that Erie beat the "bangtails," the cards and the dice, and hobnobbed with big-time Broadway mobsters. On a hungover losing streak, Erie knows that he desperately needs another Hughie, and the question is whether the new night clerk, a mousy, laconic deadhead (Jack Dodson), can be conned into the role.

In the deserted night, when the hours are small and panic is huge, Erie begins his hour-long self-sell monologue. The spiel sounds like a matter of life and death, because it is. The air is never airy in O'Neill. It is obdurate and oppressive, and his characters slash at it and through it with fast talk, sweet talk, crying talk, any kind of talk. It is a poet's speech-not that O'Neill could ever write a poetic line, but in the sense that a poet regards prose as an inadequate tool to express a man's longings. The poignant intensity of O'Neill is that his spoken lines reach unerringly toward what cannot be spoken. Into Erie's speeches filters not the loneliness of country solitude, but the friendless desolation of big-city anonymity. The rattle of a policeman's billy on an iron railing, the rumble of a subway, the screams of fire sirens that punctuate Erie's monologue are illuminated gravestones of the heart. In the midst of life, Erie is, and will always be, in death.

After Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh, it is scarcely news that Jason Robards and O'Neill are incomparable stagemates, or that Robards possesses consummate skills. He shuns Ivy League gentility, and he has never pretended to be a T-shirted slob-esthete who fusses with the Meth od. He belongs to an older and solider breed, the man in actor's clothing. He does precisely what O'Neill always asked of himself, even in this lesser play-he lays his life on the lines.

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