With Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy, Director Robert Falls Rediscovers The Iceman Cometh

"It's the great American play," says theater director Robert Falls. "You're only going to get a chance, in your lifetime, to see maybe two productions." He's referring to Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, an epic 19-character, five-hour drama from 1939 that has not received a major New York production since 1999. "It's not like The Glass Menagerie, a wonderful play that seems to come around every three years in an interesting production. This one's different." That's why Falls' acclaimed revival of Iceman, which comes to Brooklyn Academy of Music from February 5-March 15 after a run at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, is so special.

That specialness extends to the cast. Headlining the show are two-time Tony Award winners Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane, a pair of old friends who practically put the production together themselves, as well as mainstay New York and Chicago actors including John Douglas Thompson (Tamburlaine), Stephen Ouimette (Slings and Arrows), and Lee Wilkof (Little Shop of Horrors), among others. Together, they become the luckless denizens of a bar in New York's Bowery, circa 1912, who live a life of pipe dreams among sips of rotgut whiskey.

It's Falls' second time at the helm of this sprawling drama; the first, in 1990, also featured Dennehy, who now trades the leading role of traveling salesman Theodore "Hickey" Hickman for the equally important "Foolosopher" former anarchist, Larry Slade. The pair has a long history of collaboration; in fact, Dennehy won both his Tonys for the now-storied Falls-directed revivals of Death of a Salesman (1999) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (2003). ''Brian had mentioned that he really wanted to do the play again," Falls says. Before plans were even made official, the actor spilled the beans about his dream in a published interview. Lane read that interview and promptly made a phone call to Falls. "He said, 'Hickey is a role I have been dying to play my whole life. Would you consider having a conversation about it?'" says Falls. "I didn't have a moment's doubt."

It took several years for schedules to align, but the production finally came to fruition in 2012 at the Goodman, where Falls serves as artistic director. It not only took Chicago by storm, but in few-month period of its run, it was the talk of the theater community across the country. With this kind of pedigree, it's not entirely surprising. But Falls does admit he perhaps didn't realize it at first. "You're just working on the play for the joy of just working on the play," he notes. "Once it got in front of audiences, it was a really great experience for people. The response critically and audience-wise was pretty tremendous. It's then that you go "Oh, I think we have something pretty special here.'"

Twenty-five years has not changed the "big picture" of Falls' production, he admits. "I've always seen the play as almost operatic in scale, almost symphonic in its musical structure. Other productions that I've seen focus on a very realistic world of these guys in a bar, and I think the play is a larger poetic statement." What does change the material, however, is the cast. "My staging and the internal work developed out of working with the actors. Nathan could not be more different than Brian Dennehy, who could not be more different than [Hickey predecessors] Jason Robards or Kevin Spacey. You let it all mush around and change depending on [whom] you have in the room when you're working on it."

Lane, it should be noted, received mixed reviews in the 2012 Chicago production; he was often referred to with some variation of the phrase "musical-comedy clown." "I think he came [to Chicago] with a bit of a target on his back," says Falls. "The expectation for the performance now is very different," with Lane having subsequently triumphed dramatically on Broadway in 2013's The Nance and 2014's It's Only a Play. "I've always considered him one of America's greatest actors, period, who has been blessed and maybe a little bit cursed with the fact that he is a genius comic actor and musical theater star. Certainly, there's a very complex person behind that comedy. Anything he does is tinged with a sort of anger, melancholy, sadness, rage that informs all of his work."

More important, says Falls, his stars are on the same page in terms of their understanding of the Eugene O'Neill universe, a land of haunted Irish-Catholic Americans, filled with "guilt and alcohol and self-loathing. Those are not things I think [they are] not unfamiliar with."
And, really, how could you not want to see two of our generation's legendary actors take on fabulous roles in a play that only comes around once every fifteen years? "In my lifetime," Falls says, "there have only been two productions in New York. I was a little too young for the one in the early seventies [with James Earl Jones]. Jason Robards [did the play] in the mid-eighties, and then Kevin Spacey [did a] terrific production in 1999. I doubt there's going to be another one for the next fifteen to twenty years. That's what makes it special."