Actors’ Equity has petitioned the Tonys to add an ensemble-acting award to its annual spring contest. That request couldn’t have any stronger support than George C. Wolfe’s revelatory staging of “The Iceman Cometh,” which opened Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. In a Broadway season filled with fine performances, Wolfe pushes his cast, led by Denzel Washington, to uncommon excellence.
Back in the days when Theater of the Absurd was all the rage on college campuses, Eugene O’Neill’s classic used to be taught as the ultimate in theatrical naturalism. It is four-plus hours of talk among a bunch of drunks in a dead-end bar sit around waiting for Hickey, the traveling hardware salesman, who occasionally stops in to buy everyone drinks at Harry Hope’s hotel and otherwise enliven their collective hangover.