Hughie
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O’Neill’s most famous articulation of this worldview is The Iceman Cometh. Shortly after he finished it in 1939 and just after completing his other bleak masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in 1941, he composed a seemingly slight one-act, Hughie, that’s essentially an hour-long character study. But true to form, O’Neill envisioned Hughie as part of a cycle (called “By Way of Orbit”) made up of works in which two characters would discuss a recently deceased person, whose name would be the play’s title. Hughie is the only one of the proposed cycle that O’Neill completed–and it’s a good thing for Chicago audiences that he did, because Brian Dennehy’s performance in the Goodman’s staging is one of the season’s theatrical highlights. Although the production is flawed, it’s a rare thrill to see an actor of Dennehy’s caliber at the top of his game bringing O’Neill’s demanding language vibrantly to life.
Hughie is set in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan fleabag hotel in 1928, a place that O’Neill informs us in the script’s copious stage directions “began as respectable second class” but deteriorated “in order to survive.” Hughie was the hotel’s longtime night clerk whose sudden death has inspired 15-year hotel resident Erie Smith to go on a weeklong bender. As the play opens, it’s sometime after three in the morning and the small-time gambler, huckster, and occasional underworld errand boy is returning home. For Smith, Hughie was a special confidante, a sucker who swallowed his tales of Broadway intrigue hook, line, and sinker. Smith could count on Hughie to prop up his crumbling self-image, even though he knew Hughie’s opinions were so naive as to be worthless.
Dennehy also exploits the rhythmic awkwardness of O’Neill’s stilted, slang-heavy language, which on the page tends to lumber gracelessly. A fast talker who all too often finds language inadequate, Smith always has something to say that words can’t express, and Dennehy’s continual efforts to reach beyond the dialogue transform O’Neill’s supposed “lack of rhetorical exuberance” (to use Harold Bloom’s phrase) into a recognizable human limitation. At the same time, Dennehy delivers O’Neill’s gnarled sentences with such effortless clarity that one can’t help but feel he’s speaking from a deeply personal place.
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
