My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read more…]