“I am a world-class alcoholic,” growls Nick Offerman’s Eugene O’Neill. “A tragedy magnet, and by all accounts, the last person on Earth you’d want as your birth doula.”
The pride of New London, Connecticut, has a whole case of one-liners like that every time he pops out to narrate “Iceboy!,” a wacky new Goodman Theatre musical by Erin Quinn Purcell and Jay Reiss with music by Mark Hollmann and lyrics by Hollmann and Reiss. It’s like the reincarnated author of “Anna Christie” has risen from his booze-soaked grave to be the opening act at the Laugh Factory. Or to play the narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” given that Frankenstein (Alex Goodrich) is one of the characters here in a faux-screwball show that strives for the audacity of “Oh, Mary!” with many, many nods to the comedic portfolio of Mel Brooks, America’s favorite centenarian.
“If someone shushes you, don’t get annoyed at them,” O’Neill says at the top of a show that purports to tell, as anachronistically as possible, “The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh'” and thus can hardly be held accountable for lying. “It means you were talking. Unwrap your stupid candy. Young people, quick, learn how to behave in public. Old people, just fall asleep now, you know you’re going to, and be proud, naps are fantastic.”
Too fun to snooze, though.
You will not be shocked to hear that Offerman is very entertaining in this sardonic role, although it’s hardly a heavy lift for him and, at this juncture, underwritten. Similarly droll is Megan Mullally, who plays Vera Vimm, the Broadway diva who adopts a cherub-faced, 40,000-year-old Neanderthal (Grey Henson) stuck in a block of ice until he thaws his way into being the next Broadway sensation — to the chagrin of Vera’s playwright boyfriend Floyd (Cedric Yarbrough), butler Frankenstein and her maid and factotum, Lambert. Lambert is played by the hilarious Sarah Stiles, who pretty much walks off with the show here, as she did some years ago with “Tootsie” at its Chicago tryout.
Stiles has the most interesting part. The two stars of the night are stuck with funny but mostly unchanging characters, but Stiles not only gets the best number of the night — a knock-out song about menopause that will delight both the peri and the post — she gets off the best snark gags in the script.
What do we have here, exactly? A show about nothing, for sure. But proudly so, as if the writers sat in a room and imagined the most absurd musical that could come into anyone’s skulls, and then not only wrote that musical but let it take them in any direction they pleased, with no comedic digression eliminated on the grounds of how it fits with the main plot, that plot not mattering much at all. Clearly, they had a star cast that was laudably willing.
We longtime Hollmann-watchers know this impulse. He previously wrote music for shows about having to pay to pee (“Urinetown”) and another (“Yeast Nation”) set at the dawn of time and billed as “the ultimate prequel.” Reiss co-penned “Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a show in love with misfit characters. The misfits here include a horror figure reduced to butlering, a really bored rich lady, a booze-soaked playwright upset that no one remembers him even though he still is alive, and a Broadway tenor stuck inside a block of ice, where no tenor can be happy.
In Chicago, the self-aware jokes include fun poked at Robert Falls’ famously expansive revival of the actual “Iceman Cometh,” not to mention his fleet of other O’Neill epics. Longtime followers of the city’s aesthetic will see the deconstructionist influence of the Neo-Futurists. And, of course, the show is going for the rapturous response that Chicago gave “The Producers” more than 20 years ago.
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Savvy Broadway producers will look at the relatively small cast (six principal actors and six in the ensemble) and see a show that could potentially thrive on today’s Main Stem without costing a million bucks a week, assuming the star pair of Offerman and Mullally, married couple in real life, are not holding anyone to ransom. I doubt they are. I imagine that Offerman (whom I have admired from his early Chicago days with Defiant Theatre) is doing this so as to have some summer Chicago fun with his famously zany wife, and good for both of them. Life is short.
Mullally is a very experienced hand when it comes to delivering one-liners and is utterly immersed in her character, even as Offerman’s dude chats genially with the audience and tells them their cell phones are going to infuse their genitals with radiation. And I defy you not to laugh at the deliciousness of Eugene O’Neill taking on Big Tech.
What needs to be done? Well, there are not enough full-on songs. Aside from said ode to menopause, and another dedicated to the timeless practice of taking someone from behind (you have to hear it for yourself), they’re thin on the ground. O’Neill, whose name is on the marquee, does not have enough to do beyond a self-described One Big Scene, and there is a big chunk of Act 1 where Mullally’s Vera totally disappears from the show, which is weird. She also needs another musical number, ideally a big, gimme-a-Tony shebang in Act 2. Stiles, though, gets one gift after another here and accepts all of them with glee, her hair being a show unto itself. Goodrich, who mostly gets grunts, is very funny too, and Henson is anything but icy as Iceboy. Director Marc Bruni has shrewdly cast the piece, and most of his staging works nicely, modest of scale as it prefers to be.
Some of the material is theater inside-baseball; the obsession with critics might well be a play for good reviews from the fickle, LOL. Either way, general audiences will need more context in places. And any gag not landing — and there are a few — needs to go.
Most importantly, though, attention must be paid to the emotional content of the show, the heart factor, if you will.
As these writers surely know, audiences have to feel for someone, even in high farce, and old Eugene, while funny, is a bit impenetrable (needlessly, given what we know Offerman can do). And Mullally, whose character also needs to win us over, should get more options to take a break, especially musically, from the dominant comedic note in her performance. On the temperature gauge between seductive schmaltz and sardonic satire, the needle needs to adjust itself a little to the former. (“Oh, Mary!” is a good template there.) The show also needs far more drive. Moment by moment, Bruni has it in great comedic shape, but no palpable human need drives the action and the stakes. It could use one or two.
But these forget-everything-and-laugh-while-not-costing-producers-a-fortune shows are in vogue at present (wonder why?). And in an age when so many are so easily offended, material that totally removes itself from contested arenas and heads instead for culture-war safety (A frozen caveman! The plays of Eugene O’Neill! Menopause!) can be a sought-after space for exhausted audiences.
Meanwhile, as part of a Chicago summer, the air-conditioning is on at the Goodman, the ice is swirling in Eugene’s drink and, to quote Stephen Sondheim’s Petra, “it’s a wink and a wiggle and a giggle.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Iceboy! Or the Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh'” (3 stars)
When: Through Aug. 9
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $54-$229 at 312-443-3800 and goodmantheatre.org