Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh premiered at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on October 9, 1946. A day later the play was published by Random House.1 Down in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the rising star Tennessee Williams acquired a copy, read it, and typed and sent a letter to O'Neill, then living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in which he praised the Nobel Prize–winning playwright's latest work. O'Neill evidently responded, thanking Williams for lifting his spirits.Scholars and others have known of this storied exchange since 1960, when Arthur and Barbara Gelb published their first biography of O'Neill.2 The letters have been referenced since then, but neither of them has surfaced.3 Until now. The letter from O'Neill to Williams remains lost, but the letter from Williams to O'Neill has been found. In 2019 I discovered it, among other gems, at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. It is published here for the first time.4In one of the greatest diversions in literary history, in the summer of 1939 at Tao House in Danville, California, Eugene O'Neill set aside his colossal “Cycle” in order to begin two new plays that, as he recounted in his Work Diary on June 6, 1939, “seem [to] appeal most”: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh.5 He began work on Iceman on June 7 and completed his first draft on August 25, calling it “long but grand!” (WD 2:357). Work continued throughout that heart-rending year, as World War II began and quickly escalated. O'Neill finished a third and final draft on December 20, 1939, when he declared Iceman “one of [the] best plays I've ever written” (WD 2:367). Other than some “trimming” in early January of 1940, the play was finished (WD 2:368). A month later he submitted the text to the US Copyright Office.6O'Neill did not want the play produced during the war. As Louis Sheaffer notes, O'Neill felt that “audiences in wartime would be unreceptive to a drama as nihilistic as The Iceman”; initially, he showed the script only to Bennett Cerf and George Jean Nathan (503).7 Soon, however, he shared it with a small coterie of friends, including Kenneth Macgowan, Robert Edmond Jones, Armina and Lawrence Langner, and Sophus and Ilene Winther, all of whom he asked to keep its existence secret. They all responded with praise for the play, and their correspondence is included in the newly discovered documents at Yale. Nathan questioned the repetitious nature of the play, while Macgowan advised the playwright to substantially cut the work.8On December 20, 1940, Macgowan, who had been working in Hollywood, typed a letter to O'Neill on Twentieth Century–Fox Film Corporation letterhead. After two paragraphs praising the play's “gargantuan” breadth, the depth of its characters (“the men and women are so entirely complete; there isn't a touch of the rubber stamp anywhere”), and the “immense” nature of Hickey, Macgowan turned to what he called “destructive criticism.” Because he “want[ed] to see this play master its audience,” he wrote, “I think you ought to cut it and cut it pretty hard.” In a letter that I will examine more closely below, O'Neill justified the play's length and asserted, “I'm sure I won't agree with you on the advisability of any drastic condensation.”9Calls for paring the five-hour work resurfaced in the autumn of 1946, as the play was being readied for rehearsals. Lawrence Langner, co-director of the Theatre Guild, was the most pressing advocate for a shortened Iceman. This was an understandable reaction to a play that would require a curtain rise at 4:30 p.m., a dinner intermission, and a late evening final bow. The Gelbs quote Langner and O'Neill in their comments on the matter: “I could not help remarking to Gene, that, in my opinion, The Iceman Cometh, like [Shaw's] Saint Joan, would never be properly presented until after the expiration of the copyright, when it might be possible to cut it,” Langner said. “Gene smiled at me in his usual disarming way and said it would have to wait for just that.” Later O'Neill gave Langner a copy of the script, on whose first page he had written: “To Lawrence Langner, The hell with your cuts!”10 The jovial nature of these “over my dead body” exchanges should not obscure the persistent pressure that was brought to bear on O'Neill. Nor should we quickly dismiss the notion that O'Neill might have harbored some doubts about how his long play might work on an audience. His previous New York premiere—Days Without End, way back in 1934—was a critical and commercial failure. Sure, he won the Nobel Prize two years later; but, still, a decade had passed since then. The Depression had finally ended, another global war had been fought, and, more important in terms of audience expectations, the cinema, notably Hollywood filmmaking, had blossomed and boomed. In his 1940 letter Macgowan gave O'Neill a taste of this new enthusiasm for conflation and reduction: “I know that working in the telescopic, telegraphic medium of the screen-play tends to make me too impatient with words; but I feel sure that you can say everything you have to say in acts one and two in almost half the space.”11O'Neill acknowledged the changes that Hollywood had wrought. Screenwriter Dudley Nichols, who spoke with O'Neill in the early 1940s, told the Gelbs that “[O'Neill] said we have been conditioned by radio, TV, the movies, advertising, capsule news and a nervous brevity in everything we do, to a point where we have lost the power of sustained attention, which full-bodied works of art demand.”12 Surely, in postwar America, the playwright realized that his languorous tale, set in the sleepy back room of a bar in the olde New York of 1912, might seem out of pace with the torrential tempo of the time.O'Neill's encounters with the producer, director, and cast in the fall of 1946 were less than reassuring. Early on, Langner instructed an assistant to scour the script for extraneous repetitions; when they identified eighteen iterations of “the life of a pipe dream is what gives life,” O'Neill barked back, “I intended it to be repeated eighteen times!” During rehearsals, the director, Eddie Dowling, endeavored to “enliven the leisurely drama with some movement and pieces of ‘business,’ but every afternoon the playwright eliminated what the director had introduced in the morning.” The challenges the play posed were also apparent to the large cast of Broadway veterans. In interviews with the original cast and crew, Sheaffer discovered that while many actors revered the great playwright in their midst, many found Iceman “the most trying play they had ever appeared in.”13To the disconcerting swirl of doubt and tension that raged about the Martin Beck Theatre during the five long weeks of rehearsal, add the nagging sense of displacement that had permeated O'Neill's being since his return to the East Coast in October 1945. Much had changed in O'Neill's native New York during his twelve-year self-imposed exile, but the most jarring alteration was the recent demolition of his birthplace: the Barrett House, later the Cadillac Hotel, on the northeast corner of Forty-Third Street. At a press conference on September 2, 1946, O'Neill expressed his feelings of dislocation: “[I don't] know Broadway any more. It's all changed. They've even torn down the Cadillac Hotel where I was born fifty-seven years ago. There is only empty air now where I came into the world. That was a dirty trick.”14O'Neill was falling out of sync with the zeitgeist. At that press conference, America's greatest living dramatist, only a little over a year after his nation's triumph in World War II, proclaimed that America instead of being the most successful country in the world is the greatest failure … because it was given everything, more than any other country. Through moving as rapidly as it has, it has never acquired any real roots. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside of it, thereby losing your own soul and the things outside of it, too.15The Iceman Cometh premiered a month after O'Neill made this pronouncement. Robert M. Dowling provides a succinct assessment of the play's reception: “The Iceman Cometh was an ill-timed production, opening as it did amid the patriotic fervor that had gripped postwar America, a time when overall confidence in national institutions had soared to historic heights. The play frustrated and bored most audiences and received respectful and lackluster reviews, with a smattering of pans and raves.”16 Many of the pans focused on the play's length. An anonymous reviewer in Time magazine wrote, “this often static, enormously protracted play lacked the depth to match its length” and “was scarcely deeper than a puddle.” Louis Kronenberger thought Iceman “more longwindedly explicit than it is in any way profound.” And John Mason Brown quipped, “someone really ought to buy [O'Neill] a watch.”17A month later, in early November, O'Neill received a short, typed letter from the emerging playwright Tennessee Williams. O'Neill had perhaps heard of Williams's commercial debut, the doomed production of Battle of Angels by the Theatre Guild that opened and closed in its 1940 out-of-town tryout. He would certainly have been aware of the 1944 Broadway premiere of The Glass Menagerie and the accolades that greeted it. Indeed, O'Neill may have considered Eddie Dowling's acclaimed directing of that production when he tapped him to direct Iceman rather than to play the role of Hickey.18 In any case, this letter, dated November 6, 1946, coming at the moment that it did, must have buoyed O'Neill.19Dear Eugene O'Neill:I have just concluded The Iceman Cometh and am moved to tell you how strongly it impressed me and the regret that I have at not being in New York to see its performance. However even in book form the play achieves its singular effect. During the early scenes I had misgivings over the slow, relentless pace of the drama but as I read along the creative purpose back of this gradual method became apparent to me and I saw that the play gathered a massive power through this method that a facile and swiftly-paced drama could not have had. Also I came to see that the abstract quality of the characters such as Larry and Parrit[t] and the whores lifted the play above realism. All in all it strikes me as an unique dramatic achievement and I like it best of your plays since “The Hairy Ape”. God, if I could only see it!With best wishes,Tennessee Williams The longhand word “answered” on the typescript, in Carlotta Monterey O'Neill's hand, indicates that O'Neill responded to Williams's letter. The Gelbs provide support in their 1960 biography: “Late in 1946 O'Neill answered a letter from Tennessee Williams, who had written to him in praise of The Iceman. He said Williams' note had been particularly welcome because it came at a time when he was ‘down in the dumps.’”20 As was their practice throughout this book, the Gelbs did not document their claim. Decades later, they revised the anecdote: “Soon after the opening, O'Neill answers a letter from Tennessee Williams, who has written in praise of the play. O'Neill, blatantly contradicting his claim in Time that he is ‘happier now’ than he's ever been, tells Williams his letter has come just when he needs it, as he always feels a sense of ‘let-down’ after an opening.”21 The Gelbs credited an interview they conducted with Williams, apparently in 1956, three years after O'Neill's death, as well as a 1993 essay by Dan Isaac.22Isaac's essay publishes information about the Gelbs beyond that reported by the biographers themselves: In a phone interview with this writer on 26 April 1989, Arthur Gelb related how the information of an O'Neill/Williams correspondence came to him. In the late 1950s, as Mr. Gelb was gathering material for the biography, he received a phone call from Williams, who said that he wanted to be interviewed on the subject of Eugene O'Neill because O'Neill was one of his heroes. According to Mr. Gelb, who vividly recalled the occasion, a meeting took place at Williams's East Side townhouse, and when Mr. Gelb arrived, there was a letter from O'Neill to Williams displayed on the coffee table.23 Although the letter from Williams has previously escaped detection, its existence has been known.Isaac also published an excerpt from a program note, written by Williams and published in Playbill, for the 1967 production of More Stately Mansions by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.24 The entire comment by Williams, “Concerning Eugene O'Neill,” was finally published in 2009 in a collection of essays by Tennessee Williams that was edited by John S. Bak.25 It offers a further account of the 1946 exchange: In 1946, when I was living in New Orleans, I read The Iceman Cometh. This was a short while after its production on Broadway and the long-awaited event of a new play by Eugene O'Neill had seemed, to Broadway, a bit of an anti-climax. It was treated with respect but not with the complete elation that might be expected.I read the play. At first I thought to myself, this play is too long, that's the trouble. But I kept on reading it and soon I became aware that its length was indispensable to its power, its fullness of passion.I wrote him a letter to this effect, and to my surprise and pleasure I received a reply. He said that my letter had come to him at the precise time when he needed it, as he always felt, after the opening of a production, a sense of disappointment, of “let-down.”I never met Mr. O'Neill and these letters were the only communication between us.26 Unless the letter from O'Neill to Williams is found, we will never know precisely what O'Neill said to Williams. But, assuming that Williams accurately represented the tenor of the response, we know that O'Neill needed and appreciated Williams's kind words.It was a particular moment for both great dramatists. One was on the rise, approaching his legendary period of playmaking, while the other was nearing the end of his long career. Williams was putting the final touches on Summer and Smoke and would soon turn to A Streetcar Named Desire, which would premiere the next year to critical acclaim and sold-out houses. O'Neill would soon begin rehearsing his doomed final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, which would open in Columbus, Ohio, to tepid reviews and would limp through Pittsburgh and Detroit before closing, dismally, in St. Louis in late March 1947. In the summer of 1948 Williams would meet the love of his life, Frank Merlo, who would inspire and stabilize him through fifteen years of stage and film premieres, awards, and worldwide accolades. Eugene and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, heading into the third decade of their marriage, would suffer through its nihilistic Strindbergian demise.But in the momentary intersection of their public and private spheres, when the playwrights were spinning in opposite directions on fortune's wheel, one can glean the possibility of an influence that each artist had on the other. For Williams, perhaps, a letter from the winner of three Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize about feeling “let-down” might have inculcated an important lesson about the ups and downs of a long career—the type of career that Williams hoped to have. Probably the simple fact that the great O'Neill deigned to write to him invigorated the up-and-coming playwright. And Williams, too, was going through a period of fear and foreboding about his health. His conviction that he was facing a life-threatening cancer was characteristically hypochondriacal, but the feeling of dread, of morbidity, of an end time, was real to him.27 Indeed, Iceman's dark philosophy was on Williams's mind as he headed into December, struggling to finish Chart of Anatomy, the draft of Summer and Smoke, so he could get to the play that was gnawing away at his subconscious: The Poker Night, soon to be known as A Streetcar Named Desire. In his notebook on Monday, December 16, 1946, Williams wrote: “If I were well, I feel that I would be writing my best work now. If! One of Mr. O'Neill's pipe dreams.”28Several commentators have noted that Williams studied O'Neill at the University of Missouri, and many have observed similarities between the early work of the playwrights, especially Williams's American Blues anthology and O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn series.29 But only John S. Bak, in a splendid 2018 essay subtitled “Tennessee Williams's Evolving Impressions of Eugene O'Neill,” has heretofore considered O'Neill's influence on Williams extensively.30 Bak discusses a 1936 seminar paper by Williams that he unearthed, entitled “Some Representative Plays of O'Neill and a Discussion of His Art,” in which the undergraduate skewered the newly minted Nobel laureate. Bak describes and quotes from that work: [It] quickly degenerates into a full-frontal assault on O'Neill's dramaturgy, language, and characters, with Williams never failing to supply a colorful barb with each new turn of phrase: “It seems to me that O'Neill was first, last, and always the born showman. Barnum and Bailey are not more replete with tricks for catching and holding public attention. In almost every major production we find him using some new and startling (?) device to give his work a superficial novelty.”31 Bak goes on to identify the “tricks” and “devices” that annoyed Williams, notably O'Neill's use of masks in The Great God Brown and stream-of-consciousness speech in Strange Interlude. Although Williams's assessment—based on a full reading of O'Neill's work to date—was mostly denigrative, Williams did admire The Hairy Ape then as he would later. “It is the only play in the seminar paper that Williams assesses favorably,” Bak states. In a reference to Williams's own canon, he adds, “that this play's ‘fugitive kind’”—indicating O'Neill's alienated Yank—“would soon become Williams's signature theme is no doubt significant.”32As the subtitle of Bak's essay suggests, Williams's impression of O'Neill evolved over several decades. Bak finds Williams gradually developing a sense of kinship with O'Neill, enabled by the haunted family lives they both lived and reaffirmed in Williams's 1976 painting of O'Neill standing in front of Monte Cristo Cottage. Bak concludes, “perhaps [Williams] began to see O'Neill less as a rival and more as a kindred spirit, not just in how they exorcized their family demons through their art, but also in how those personal ghosts spoke to universal human longings and sufferings.”33I would go a step further, now that I have had the opportunity to read the full 1967 comment by Williams in that More Stately Mansions program note: I suggest that Williams believed that he shared with O'Neill similar traits and experiences. In the 1967 essay, Williams asserts that “Eugene O'Neill was not just a playwright but an intensely dedicated artist”; declares the Gelbs' 1960 O'Neill a “fine biographical study”; praises O'Neill's “great works,” referencing the Tao House plays that postdate the oeuvre that Williams had criticized in his student essay; and hones in on O'Neill's passionate nature: What was it that required of O'Neill the artist so much torment, above and beyond that degree of torment that comes inevitably with being an artist? I would guess that it was his stature and nobility of spirit. To compromise with the deeply brooding nature of his art was a thing unthinkable for him, and of course he never did it. I don't have the statistics on his failures and successes, but I would venture to guess that he was often misunderstood by his audience and critics. He had the burden of being a truly passionate man and I would suspect he was a man who found it hard to accept and smile at the ways of the world he lived in…. I am inclined to think that it must have been unusually hard for him to take, in his profession, a reversal at all lightly.34Iceman's negative reception becomes in Williams's essay a tough “reversal” for O'Neill: the letter to O'Neill, Williams writes, reached O'Neill “at the precise time when he needed it.” No stranger to failure himself by 1967, Williams concluded thus: “Eugene O'Neill was loved, deeply liked, and respected by so many people, which might have given him much comfort and relief that he needed. But to be an artist is essentially to be lonely. To be passionate and to be lonely isn't the easiest of things in the world.”35 The clear implication is that Williams is talking not only about O'Neill but about himself as well. In that moment of reflection on passion, torment, compromise, reversals, and loneliness, he is remarking on his consanguinity of spirit with his brother- in-art, Eugene O'Neill.We leave it to Professor Bak and other Williams scholars to interrogate the trenchant insights that Williams ticks off in his letter to O'Neill, from the appreciation of Iceman's slow start and its steady and powerful build, to the reverence for the “abstract quality” of “Larry and Parrit[t] and the whores” that “lifted the play above realism” to the atmospheric layer of “an unique dramatic achievement” akin to The Hairy Ape. The Williams community can best determine whether the dramaturgical notes and lessons learned from O'Neill's play had any effect upon Williams and his ensuing work.But as to Williams's impact on O'Neill?It was immediate. As noted, Williams's letter raised the spirit of O'Neill, lifting him from his post-opening blues. The historical record offers support. O'Neill's various biographers recount tales of O'Neill's ebullience during that holiday season at the end of 1946, from one party at which O'Neill joined his favorite songwriter, Irving Berlin, for a sing-along, to another party where the ribald Burl Ives entertained O'Neill with bawdy and licentious old tunes.36But it can also be argued that Williams's letter had a more deep and lasting impact on O'Neill. As we have seen, O'Neill was under considerable pressure to trim his play. Once the reviews came out, the pressure increased. In the first month of the run, more than 10 percent of each night's audience did not return after the dinner break. Furthermore, a new generation of critics—among them Mary McCarthy and Eric Bentley—was sniping at O'Neill, proclaiming that he had lost his touch or perhaps never had a “touch” to lose. Sheaffer summed up the common perception of O'Neill in the late 1940s and described what was to come: “The pronouncements of Bentley and Miss McCarthy were among the opening shots in an attack that would diminish O'Neill's reputation among the intelligentsia and the young. While still alive, he would come to appear more of historic than of lasting importance to the American drama.”37 These threats to O'Neill's status perhaps constituted the professional “reversal” that Williams posits. All this being said, however, I do not believe that O'Neill cared about such perceived hierarchies. But I do think that he cared, deeply, about the efficacy of his work. O'Neill was after something—different—in Iceman. He had said as much back on December 30, 1940, when he sent his defense of the play's length to Macgowan, focusing on the issue of cutting: I honestly believe if I did it you would be the first to see afterward it was wrong because it had changed the essential character and unique quality of the play. After all, what I've tried to write is a play where at the end you feel you know the souls of the seventeen men and women who appear—and the women who don't appear—as well as if you'd read a play about each of them. I couldn't condense much without taking a lot of life from some of these people and reducing them to lay figures…. It's hard to explain exactly my intuitions about this play. Perhaps I can put it best by saying The Iceman Cometh is something I want to make life reveal about itself, fully and deeply and roundly—that it takes place for me in life not in a theatre—that the fact it is a play which can be produced with actors is secondary and incidental to me and even, quite unimportant—and so it would be a loss to me to sacrifice anything of the complete life for the sake of the stage and audience.That doesn't say it, but never mind. You'll get what I mean.38 Perhaps Macgowan never did “get” what O'Neill meant. And we know that the cast, the director, and the producer, like most critics and other viewers, did not comprehend what O'Neill was after, either.But Tennessee Williams got it. He saw it for what it was and what O'Neill intended it to be.Despite his early “misgivings” about “the slow, relentless pace of the drama,” Williams could see “the creative purpose back of this gradual method,” and, in seeing the method to O'Neill's seeming madness, the younger playwright could also see “that the play gathered a massive power through this method that a facile and swiftly-paced drama could not have had.” Williams's appreciation of O'Neill's slow pace and breadth contrasts his 1936 collegiate assessment of one of O'Neill's longest plays, the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra. Back then, Williams had decried that play's length for taking American theatre “in the wrong direction” since “modern life tends to speed up everything and the more we can say in a small space the greater will be our probable success.”39Just by reading Iceman, Williams could feel its “unique dramatic achievement” of making life reveal itself “fully and deeply and roundly,” just as O'Neill had stated, years earlier, to Macgowan, was his purpose in creating a play with a “unique quality.” And both playwrights saw the integrity of the piece: its structural soundness, wholeness, and singularity. Williams recognized Iceman's “singular effect,” what O'Neill called “the complete life” of a play that “takes place for me in life not in a theatre.”40Unfortunately, O'Neill never had the opportunity to see a production of The Iceman Cometh that successfully delivered that “complete life” he had in his mind and his soul when he wrote that sad, tragic tale set in Hope's backroom. But, thanks to Tennessee Williams, he knew that such a rendering was possible.One cannot help but think, and hope, that the receipt of that letter from Williams brought O'Neill closer to some form of closure with regard to this play and its idea of hopeless hope, a certain satisfaction in knowing that Iceman, in all its wide-ranging, lengthy, and repetitious manifestations, would eventually be grasped, fathomed, and most important, understood.To be fair, Williams was not the only person who received Iceman as the playwright hoped or intended. Letters from O'Neill's friends written from 1940 to 1946 (and newly available) must have assured him that his objective was achievable. Robert Edmond Jones, O'Neill's close friend and the renowned designer (who would design the set for the premiere), wrote to O'Neill on December 9, 1940: I think it is one of the world's great plays. When I read it I forgot all about its being the MS. of a play and became utterly absorbed in the experience of it. And what an experience. Such torture and such wonder and triumph. It will strain the resources of our theatre to get it properly performed, but that is one thing your plays are for, in my opinion.41 Armina Langner, who read the play in the summer of 1940, wrote this to her friend, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, to pass on to her husband: I think it is a very fine play and deeply significant and moving. As a matter of fact since reading it, I have been haunted by those characters. They are that vivid and real to me. And also it is surely the test of a very fine play when, after you have read it, you feel you understand better some of the people around you—see them with new eyes possibly.42 So Williams was not alone in his understanding of the play. But perhaps his letter to O'Neill was a capstone, helping to cement in O'Neill's mind a sense of resolve and completion and, yes, closure, with regard to this unfathomable, “gargantuan” opus.Three years after O'Neill's death, in 1956, Jose Quintero directed a company of actors, including Jason Robards as Hickey and Peter Falk as Rocky, at a small Off-Broadway theatre called Circle in the Square. This simple production in a confined space with the audience seated all around finally brought to life O'Neill's vast idea for the play. Audiences loved it, collectively fulfilling O'Neill's prescient comment to Macgowan: “You'll get what I mean.” Some of the critics who had initially dismissed Iceman now “got” it, too. Sheaffer recounts that “where [the New York Times's] Brooks Atkinson, like so many others, had once thought the play too long, he now felt that its length was ‘an essential part of its power…. It seems not like something written, but like something that is happening.’”43 This notion mirrors O'Neill's “intuitions about this play” that he tried to explain to Macgowan back in 1940: “The Iceman Cometh is something I want to make life reveal about itself, fully and deeply and roundly … it takes place for me in life not in a theatre ….” Late in his life, Robards, with many O'Neill roles to his credit, would sum up his understanding of how an O'Neill play worked on its players and audience: “we break time—if we do it right.”44 Interestingly, and ironically, Macgowan had touched on such an idea in his 1940 letter to O'Neill, when he essentially demanded that O'Neill treat the play “like a Greek tragedy,” with no intermission and “an hour and a half of torment and exaltation,” so “it should march, charge, crash, without anyone getting a sense of time ever existing.”45 Whereas Macgowan sensed O'Neill's method, but mistrusted its impact on an audience, Atkinson and Robards celebrated it.O'Neill never met Robards, but no doubt he would have been heartened to hear him so succinctly describe what he had hoped to accomplish in his work: to slow down, to speed up, to elongate, to shorten, and, sure, at times to disrupt the temporal plane.To play—with time.That was, is, and ever shall be, O'Neill's “unique dramatic achievement.”And he knew it.That is why the seasoned playwright brought the curtain up on The Iceman Cometh, with an utterance from Rocky, after the barkeep wades his way through a sea of sleepy, slow-moving, hopeless, but still hope-filled creatures, in order to deliver whiskey and a glass to the solitary conscious citizen of O'Neill's pipe-dream world, Larry Slade.Rocky, as he doles out the first of many, many drinks, “in a low voice out of the side of his mouth,” drops this short, brisk, opening line, at the start of this lengthy, lengthy play: “Make it fast.”46If ever there was a wink of an eye to the ages—this is it.