Gala 25 of Shakespeare & Company honored alumni of its Center for Acting Training, Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson. Both are distinguished “lifers” who have been with the company for more than 20 years. Miller was already an established actor when she enrolled. 

I first met Thompson when he performed in Othello in 2008. That initiated the first of many discussions. It has been a complex and enlightening dialogue. It was with great interest that I reviewed him in many roles. With time his reputation was ever more widely recognized as one of the leading classical actors of his generation. While his heart and soul is dedicated to theatre a wider audience has come to appreciate his work through the HBO series “The Gilded Age.” 

Initially in sales, after seeing an August Wilson play at Yale Rep, John got a late start in theatre. He enrolled in the Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company program in Providence, Rhode Island. Having completed a two year program he spent that summer of 1994 training at S&Co. That led to a distinguished career performing the major roles in the canon. He recently performed Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Thompson is a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards, three Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award.  Early on I found his Richard III problematic. My paradigm for the role was Sir Lawrence Olivier’s. It was a film I often presented to students.

That got us off to a bad start but the beginning of passionate debates and many interviews. As a jazz critic I was involved with the Terry Teachout one-man-play Satchmo a the Waldorf. To help John with research I cut a set of Armstrong CD’s as well as those of Jelly Roll Morton. The play focuses on Satchmo later in his career when he was more of a celebrity than cutting edge musician as he had been in his youth.

In the summer of 2013 we had lunch in Pittsfield and he had just performed the August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in LA at Mark Taper Theatre. I asked him about it.

“It’s the role that made me want to be an actor,” he said. “It was a dream come true because I thought I would never have a chance to do it. I thought I was getting too long in the tooth to play Herald Loomis.”

(Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1984, is the second in a series of August Wilson’s The Century Cycle, which chronicled the struggles and lives of African Americans in the 20th century. It is set in the second decade of the 20th century and chronicles the lives of a few freed, formerly enslaved African Americans in the North.)

“As Wilson wrote him he’s 32-years-old. When I was out there playing him I went from 49 to 50. We went up May 8 and my birthday was May 28. Obviously, age-wise, I’m too old to play the character. I knew going into it that I might never get the opportunity to play it because I’m too old now. So I was very thankful when Phylicia Rashad asked me to be in the production; to play Herald Loomis.

“It was a full circle event for me in my life. It’s part of my own personal mythology. The whole event of going to that play. The date that didn’t show up. Going to the play myself. Seeing this work was perhaps the second or third play I had seen in my life. Being so profoundly moved by the story. The nobility of all these African Americans on stage; all at once in the same play.

“I had romanticized this play in my mind over and over and over again. When and if I get a chance to be in it. My biggest challenge when I got the role was moving away from romanticizing it; the play and the character and the role. And start to do the hard work of understanding the character and truly understanding the play. Understanding what August Wilson was trying to get across to the audience.

“It was really really hard for me. It didn’t turn out the way I had been fantasizing about it. Thank God I had Phylicia Rashad. She guided me through this maze. It’s one of those roles you could so easily turn into anger. You’re very upset about what’s happened to you in your life. You hate people. You hate everybody. You hate yourself so all that comes out of you is pure anger because of the situation. She was there as a faithful guide to direct me to some vulnerable aspects of the character, which really helped me.”

Though regarded primarily for his classic roles he has explored a wide range of diverse work. After touring with Satchmo in 2015 he told me. ” I come back to New York to do The Father and The Doll’s House in rotating rep at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. I play The Captain in Strindberg’s The Father and Torvald in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. As far as I know this repertory has never been done before, certainly not in this country or internationally. Strindberg and Ibsen were not the best of friends. These plays seem to be in dialogue with one another.

“My roles in both plays are similar in that I’m playing a husband and father but differ in their approaches to the male dynamic in what would seem to be good marriages somehow gone sour.

“I’ve done some Ibsen in the past, I did Hedda Gabler at New York Theatre Workshop. I played Judge Brack directed by Ivo von Hove, but I’ve never done any Strindberg.”

While much in demand he has returned to S&Co. for special projects. He joined Olympia Dukakis in a 2013 production of Mother Courage and Her Children.  She became ill not long after a well received opening. In 2015 he portrayed Ira Aldrich the first black actor to perform Shakespeare on the London Stage. Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti was directed by Daniela Varon. 

At the Gala Astrid and I were invited to join his table of friends including his chiropractor, manager, the director Daniela Varon who was one of his early teachers, as well as the actress Kelley Curran who appears with him in The Gilded Age. 

He was swarmed with well-wishers. It was remarkable to experience his charisma, warmth and energy. I finally got to ask a question.

In episode one of the new season his daughter, a secretary to spinster sisters, takes ill. I asked “Does your daughter die?”

There was a hard pause before he replied “Yes, I know. I could tell you. But then I would have to kill you.”

Curran softened that by telling me that “We have to sign NDA agreements.” We will have to wait and find out but I look forward to seeing her this season in episodes 4 and 8.

My “interview” this time was brief and pithy. What follows is one from 2012 that we conducted when I saw him in the Chicago production of Iceman Cometh. It later moved to New York. The focus of our discussion was on black roles in works by Eugene O’Neill. Typically, it was a long process as we edited the text. He is committed to the precise use of language which entails scrutiny of ever line. 

Charles Giuliano I want to know everything about Iceman.

John Douglas Thompson We don’t have enough time for that. I could talk about Iceman for a whole year. You saw it. You know how explosive the experience was. It’s vast, what O’Neill was writing about, and profound.

CG It took almost a year to see it. (Four and a half hours in four acts)

JDT Back in the day, when they were writing plays of that length O’Neill was trying to write plays that explored the human condition with depth. People could sit and listen to these plays, not just for two and a half hours, as we do today. It takes time to see an O’Neill Play, that’s part of the event. Nowadays we don’t have that kind of patience. So, to do a play like Iceman, in a city like Chicago, in a theatre like the Goodman, for that audience, was a very exciting experience. That the audience would stay there attentively; listening to every word, waiting to get back to their seats after each intermission. What they were experiencing was the humanity of O’Neill’s characters and understanding them in a profound way. I don’t think I’ve been in a play like that before; with that length, and at that depth. It was really like going back in time for me. To an era when those kinds of plays existed.

CG Can we talk about working with the director Robert Falls and that great cast with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy? What specifically did you get from Falls?

JDT I don’t think you have another theatre director who understands O’Neill as well as he does. Obviously, I have worked with other directors who understand O’Neill but Falls is exceptional because of his breadth of experience. He has done several other O’Neill plays, including Iceman, more than once. His knowledge of the play and how it works was very extensive. He understood the play as an opera which is how he directed it. If you look at the play you can see the resemblance where all of the characters get to have their aria. He was really meticulous in his directing. What I learned from him was that you have this kind of play with a lot of information. There are a lot of characters talking about their lives and interacting with one another. It really needs to be staged as if it’s an opera. Bring in various instruments here and bring them in down there, bring in the louder sound, and so forth; then you have the human voice coming in. He was really specific with that. That’s one of the things that made the production so successful.

CG Let’s talk about the interaction with other actors particularly Nathan Lane as Hickey. His performance drew mixed reactions.

JDT I think Nathan’s performance was quite incredible. I watched it every night and you’re talking about a true professional. There wasn’t a moment in any performance when he wasn’t giving 120%. I thought he nailed Hickey. From day one, he was already on top of that play, on top of that information, on top of that character. For me, who had never seen the play before except on a video, never experienced it as an actor before, I was able to see what you need to bring to make O’Neill come alive. That’s what Nathan was doing. It was the same thing with Brian Dennehy. You get in the same room with those guys and you begin to understand the parameters. What an actor can actually bring to great writing. And what great writing can bring to a committed actor.

CG There were so many vignettes. You could go up and down the line with all of the individual actors. As you said they all had their arias. Let’s talk about your aria and the familiar but difficult topic of race. It’s the period. One feels a lot of racism in the characters but not necessarily in O’Neill. Not even to go to your character, Joe Mott, one of the other characters is constantly referred to as a Wop.

JDT The racism is all over in that play. The South African guy, to the Italian, the Irishman and to the Negro. That’s what I found when researching the play, that he was an equal opportunity employer. When it came to all the Isms everybody got it. That’s what made my existence, Joe Mott’s existence in that community, even more profound. It wasn’t just him.

CG What the heck was Joe Mott doing in Harry Hope’s saloon?

JDT We did this great exercise, the whole cast collectively, which I hadn’t done since drama school. All of the actors come up with a back story about how they got to Harry Hope’s bar. What events in their lives led them to being in Harry Hope’s bar? Doing this we all seemed to intersect with one another, even though we weren’t trying to do that. We would say “Now I know you, and I understand why you’re a friend of mine.” From this exercise it became clear to me how I hooked up with Harry, and all the other denizens of the bar.

Joe Mott was a gambler. In my back story he ran one of the Black and Tan clubs that existed in various parts of New York City from the Bowery to Harlem and certain neighborhoods in between in the early 1900s. He got in good with the people at Tammany Hall. They allowed him to open a gambling joint. He would be able to deliver black votes. He could help to get people in office. Many blacks were coming into cities like New York and Chicago. The Great Migration (from the South) was going on at that time. So someone like Joe Mott could deliver votes to keep a specific politician in office. I paid my graft; I treated them the way they wanted to be treated when they come into my club. I made out pretty well. So Joe Mott was entrepreneurial, a smart guy.

However, I feel the Negro community turned on Joe because he was doing more for the politicians in Tammany Hall than he was for his own people. Eventually, they didn’t vote the way he wanted them to vote. And the politicians at Tammany Hall didn’t get what they wanted, so they ran him out of business. And that’s it.

CG That’s not in the script. That’s your back story.

JDT That’s what actors have to do. So that’s what happened before I got to Harry Hope’s.

CG When you develop a back story are there notes and resources to draw on?

JDT I didn’t draw this out of my imagination. Joe Mott is actually based on a real friend of O’Neill’s named Joe Smith. The research is pretty extensive. I built a story which was most likely to be true. There were black owners of Black and Tan clubs who ran gambling houses back in that day. So this was all based on historical New York fact. I just put Joe Mott inside of that. I began to thread my character as he related to Harry Hope. How he got to Harry Hope’s because the play starts with all of us already there.

CG At this point in your career why would you spend several months in Chicago, leaving your base and primary opportunities in New York, to play a role in an ensemble production in which you are not a marquee player? Reading the reviews, however, you were always noted for your powerful aria.

JDT My motivation was Eugene O’Neill.

First. That play is rarely done. It comes along once in a decade if that. I wanted to be a part of this experience because it’s probably not going to happen for me again. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Secondly, as I had with The Emperor Jones, I wanted to continue my exploration of African American characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays.

CG Are there others or just those two?

JDT There’s two more. There’s one The Dreamy Kid (one act, 1918) and All Gods Chillun Got Wings (1924). But the major ones are Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones and Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh. This is a part of my continuing exploration. Then I got the chance to work with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy; when is that going to happen again in my life?

You don’t care about the role. You don’t say, oh, this isn’t the kind of role I usually play. That goes out the window. This is a collaborative effort. As you sat and watched that play you could see how the collaboration of all the other actors made that play something special.

CG You said the same thing about playing a supporting role in King Lear with Sam Waterson.

JDT They’re all good parts. At some point maybe I will play Lear. To be on stage, to get an opportunity to work with someone like Sam Waterson, Nathan Lane, Brian Dennehy, those are opportunities to work with the icons of our business. Everyone knows who they are and the great work they have done. As a young professional I want to see these guys. I want to work with them.

CG How well do you now known them? What kind of camaraderie develops out of working for months together on a play?

JDT There’s a great camaraderie that develops because you get to know each other within the context of what you are doing in a rehearsal room. Sometimes friendships are forged, bonds are made. You remember those people after the play is over. It’s not like you become best friends. That’s not the relationship I’m talking about. It’s more of a working relationship. The hope is you’ll work together again down the road because you have an understanding of what you can deliver, and a mutual respect for one another.

CG O’Neill was of his time and surrounded by racism in America. You have now performed in Iceman and Emperor Jones. How do they reflect his views? You seem to feel that he was different and can you say how?

JDT Absolutely. He understood the plight of the African American in this country very well as a writer. He understood the complexity, the subtlety of it, and the various shades. He conveyed what African Americans had to deal with in this particular country. If you look at a character like Brutus Jones, and particularly, Joe Mott, it’s not a one dimensional character that he has created. Both are multi-dimensional characters who express their feelings, emotions, and the impact of racism on their psyche. So I don’t think of O’Neill as looking on black people in a stereotypical way, he went deep.

From my study of Joe Mott the character came from a good friend of O’Neill’s named Joe Smith. He was married to an Irish woman down in the Bowery section of New York. When O’Neill went on binges he would spend time in Smith’s apartment. O’Neill would be close to death and Smith would nurse him back to health. O’Neill knew African Americans not just as second class citizens but as human beings, and afforded the humanity they deserved. He was the only writer at that time who tried to articulate their journey.

 What O’Neill has been accused of, and wrongfully so, is for writing black characters who are stereotyped. What I am trying to present is the opposite. He wrote characters that had a great deal of dimension and depth. They have an emotional resonance that helps us to understand the human condition and the plight of African Americans at the turn of the century. It seems to me that O’Neill sided with African Americans, agreeing that they have been dealt a very bad hand by the powers that be. These people are noble and dignified and deserve much better. That’s what you see in Brutus Jones. That’s what you see in Joe Mott, a man trapped by the racism of the day, who deserved so much better than he got.

Other white writers of the time were not writing black characters like O’Neill. They weren’t even writing black characters at all. They just said ‘the hell with it. I’m just not going to include them in my story line.’ O’Neill was incredibly brave in what he did. Not only with Emperor Jones, which was the first time that white audiences saw a black man as a lead on stage. It’s 1919. Imagine if you were sitting in the audience. You came to see Emperor Jones and you saw a black man. It would blow your mind. O’Neill did it. He emphatically said it has to be a black man. ‘I don’t want some white guy in black face playing Emperor Jones. I demand that it be a black actor.’ And they found one and a great one in Charles Sidney Gilpin.

(Charles Sidney Gilpin, 1878 – 1930, was a stage actor of the 1920s. He played in two New York City debuts: the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln and the lead role of Brutus Jones in the 1920 premiere of Eugene of The Emperor Jones which he later toured. In 1920, he was the first black person to receive The Drama League’s annual award as one of ten people who had done the most that year for American theatre.)

O’Neill did a lot for having blacks portray the true dimension of black characters in American theatre. He started it and did it with Joe Mott and Brutus Jones. If you see August Wilson’s plays you have to see that they’re connected. You see a bunch of Brutus Joneses in August Wilson’s plays, or, Joe Motts. O’Neill wasn’t caught up in the racism of the day. He was trying to give a voice to the black man and that’s what I tried to articulate in both of those plays.

CG The Irish did not endure slavery or the Middle Passage. But, during the Potato Famine they emigrated in what were known as The Black Ships under horrendous conditions. The first waves ended up in New Orleans where they fought blacks and poor whites for the worst jobs on the levees and docks. Because they resorted to violence in eliminating competition they became knows as Hooligans. They came to America fighting for the lowest rung on the social and economic ladder. Perhaps that’s a part of what gives O’Neill such empathy for Joe Mott and the assortment of immigrants in Iceman. Perhaps it is a refection, through O’Neill, of the Irish experience in America.

JDT Look at all the people in Harry Hope’s bar. There is that whole mix and he is saying ‘This is what America is.’ He had empathy for everyone in the bar. There is racism toward the Irish, British, South African, Italian, African American, everyone in that bar. Everyone gets their share.

After doing this play I look back at O’Neill with awe. He wrote the play in the 1930s but it is set in 1912. He had that much empathy for all these races of people and to write them as articulately as he could. He gave them dimension, subtlety, emotion and depth. It’s genius what he was able to do. Iceman is one of his great works because the study of the human condition is so deep in that play.

The commitment of these actors that I got to share the stage with, those from New York, those from Chicago, was so fucking good and so clear. They had such a strong intention that they brought those characters to life. I was moved by their performances while I was on stage with them. This hasn’t happened to me before. It was a profound experience.

Studying the play you realize that all these characters were people he knew. They weren’t figments of his imagination. These were real lives and were his friends. He changed the names but these were real people that he was talking about.

As an actor, you feel a moral obligation to play these characters right. You have to give it your all. He was writing from a place of pain, not just for himself, but for everyone else. So when I look at what he wrote for Joe Mott he was trying to capture the pain for the African American man living in turn of the century America. And what he or she had to deal with just to survive. I think he captured that.

CG We have talked a lot about the process of developing characters from Shakespeare. You research and find your way into remote historical eras. Now we are talking about plays set in the 20th century. In this process what do you find and discover about yourself?

JDT To answer that requires taking a personal inventory which is hard for me.

CG You have to find something in yourself in order to honestly portray that character. How does it become real for you and the audience?

JDT (Pause) Let me think about that. I can’t give you now any answer that would make sense. That’s personal to me. It’s like talking about what makes you tick. I don’t know if I want to talk about that. Once I talk about that, and define it, then I’ve killed it. I want certain things to remain a mystery.

CG Why is this a difficult question for you and what do you mean by killing it?

JDT It’s personal and involves cataloguing what I do, and how I do what I do, what I’ve learned about what I do. I would like to leave that a mystery. Some of it is a mystery even to me. I want to leave it as it is. Once you go out there and define everything that you do, at least for me, I think you kill it.

CG We have talked a lot, on a number of occasions, about your work and craft. This raises the issues of boundaries between public and private. As an actor you are a public figure. For many individuals in public positions sustaining a private life is difficult. Reading the New Yorker profile, for example, I was surprised to find details we had never talked about. There was information about your family which we have never discussed. What does the public have the right to know and what’s off limits?

JDT I don’t think you tell everybody everything. It comes down to the kinds of questions you’re asked. When I did the New Yorker interview (May 21, 2012 by Alec Wilkinson) he said, specifically, “I would like to talk about your family.” I don’t think you ever asked me that question. If someone asks those questions you have the option to answer or say “That’s a little too close to home. If you don’t mind I’d rather not talk about that.” Whenever Alec asked any personal questions he said “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it.” It’s a question from you, the journalist, and then it is up to the person to address it. There are many areas of my life that I would not openly talk about. I don’t think I’ll ever talk about them. You’ve got to keep something to yourself.

I don’t consider myself a public person. I consider myself a private person. I get viewed by the public but that doesn’t mean that my life is an open book. I don’t confuse those things. I’m not on that level of attention. People aren’t in my life that way. I don’t require that and don’t want people peeping into my life.

I really do like acting. Good can come from it and the people who I do it for. This competitive animal rising to the heights, I think I’ve told you this before, that’s not me. I have no idea where my career is going to go. I’m not sitting down planning it. I’m happy for those who get wonderful opportunities be it in movies, TV, or stage. This is hard work that we do. Any time that my peers succeed on that level I’m happy for them. The only way I create opportunities for myself is by being happy for them. Not being jealous or competitive with them. There’s enough room for all of us and I’m happy with what they have and happy for what comes to me. I’m not at a point where I would share all of my information with people because I’m supposed to, or because somebody asked me to. I can still say no and hold on to what is my essence. I can keep it to myself.

So certain things I don’t want to define. Like when people ask “Tell me how you did this thing? Tell me how you created this?” I can talk around it. Even when we’ve talked about Richard III or Othello, some of them are secrets even to me. Some of them are mysteries even for me. I don’t question them and don’t want to get to the bottom of them. I just let them exist as they are. Hopefully, they can serve me as I move on into the future, but I don’t have to know them. I truly believe once you define something too much you kill it. You don’t have it to go back to anymore. You’ve drained all of the water out of the well. It’s dry. Leave it alone. Let the rain keep coming down. It fills the well and you drink from it. But you don’t need to know how the water got in the well. You don’t need to know the contents of the well. You just need to know there’s water there. And you can get some water when you’re thirsty. That’s it.

This is a very interesting question which you posed to me but I haven’t even figured it out. As I was trying to come up with an answer, you know, there is no answer. Maybe you just leave that alone.

CG The first act of Iceman is very slow, dark and difficult. All of the characters are on stage slumped over and sleeping. The Brian Dennehy character sustains most of the act. Things become animated when Hickey (Nathan Lane) arrives. It takes so much patience for the audience to follow this.

JDT That’s the expertise of Robert Falls. Pacing it and building it really, really slow. Another director who isn’t as skilled as Robert might have cut some of that. If you play it faster you loose the payoff. I thought it was really smart. Considering what different directors might do with that kind of material. If you read the play there are stage directions and we followed them. O’Neill wanted companies, actors, directors to follow what he put on the page. He wanted them to follow it explicitly. We did it and the payoff is that you get an incredible panoramic view of this human story from many different angles.

CG Sitting in the audience for some four and a half hours, as your friend, I was aware of the physical demands for the performers to do that night after night. The physical challenges must be enormous. When we spoke briefly, the morning after seeing the play, I recall that you told me that at times the actors do doze off.

JDT There are times when you get lulled and are right on the verge of sleeping. There is another part of you which is still focused on what’s going on, so you know where you need to be, and when you need to be there. It’s physically and emotionally demanding to focus yourself in that way.  That’s what rehearsals are for, to build that muscle. By doing that, you really start to come into your character. You come into the character of these people who are drunkards. They are characters who are living for the next drink wherever it is coming from.  How am I going to get my next shot of whiskey? It becomes fascinating; a real in depth study of the human psyche of an individual who is an alcoholic, and living with a pipe dream.

CG That seems so physically demanding. I noticed that Dennehy was the only one on stage with padding under his seat.

JDT It was physically demanding for all of us, young, and old. There are people from almost every age group in the play. It is another indicator of the genius of O’Neill that he could write a play that included people in their twenties as well as characters in their sixties and seventies. It’s a great play that was physically demanding for all of us. After awhile you didn’t talk about it anymore. You just do it. That was a part of the experience of the play, not only for the audience, but for the performers. There’s no easy way out.  

It’s a part of why I say you celebrate the successes of your peers because you know first hand that this is really hard work. I would like the public to know just how hard actors work at delivering a product that they can enjoy. There are hours, and hours, and hours, of physical rehearsal. Hours, and hours, and hours of mental rehearsal. That play, Iceman sums it all up for me. I want to play Hickey. I want to know what that challenge would be like for me. I desperately want to play Hickey.

CG You want to play Hickey?

JDT Absolutely. Oh yes. Of course. That’s the thing about O’Neill’s plays. All that they demand is that you bring the truth about human conditions. That’s all he requires. And he requires you to go deep. Go as deep as you can. And, when you find that place, try to go deeper. He says that’s where I need you to go and this is really painful stuff. Hickey finally gets to the point where he tells everyone that he killed his wife. He killed her because he hated her. He built up this hate over time. My God! What a nightmare for this man to have lived through. That comes directly out of O’Neill’s experience with women. There is so much about O’Neill and women in that play that he carried around. He was writing from the depth of his soul. What that requires from an actor is to go to the depth of his or her soul and O’Neill would accept nothing less. What I like about him is that he holds your feet to the fire. He makes you go deeper than you’ve ever gone before.  

CG Are you saying that Iceman is a high point of your career?

JDT Yes. It ranks up there with Othello and Emperor Jones, without question. Of course I’ve had some really good experiences with other Shakespeare plays and some non Shakespeare plays. As you say, Joe Mott in Iceman was not a big part. But then I look at that play and there are no small parts. We all have to hold everything up for everyone else. That’s what made this production so unique.

CG The explosion of your “aria” in the third act was surely a high point of the Goodman production of The Iceman Cometh. There is anger and violence in Joe Mott. He charges out slamming the door with a, fuck you, to the drunks in Harry Hope’s bar. You are off to raise a new stake to start another black and tan club. To get back on your game and show something to all who scorned and snubbed you. Then, in the fourth act, like everyone else whom Hickey conspired to push out the door, you come crawling back looking for your old room and a shot of whiskey.

JDT That’s right. O’Neill didn’t leave anybody out. The anger and violence in that speech is what O’Neill captured so well. Not just for an African American but this is what happens when someone is put under that kind of pressure. When someone’s life is devalued and they have been made into second class citizens.  This is what happens when they become invisible. It’s what boils underneath and at some point erupts. The whole pacing of the play, and what happens to Joe Mott prior to that moment, serves as a precursor to his violent expression about racism.

CG You are talking about the character in a more broadly humanistic context than just as a black man. You are describing him as any oppressed individual.

JDT Absolutely. But it is very specific that this is an African American so there is specific language than goes along with that. What O’Neill was getting at was the repressed anger of the oppressed. Joe Mott wants everyone to know, it’s over. I’m not going to take this anymore. Everyone sits up and listens to Joe when he has that outburst. They listen to him and then he goes. He’s not coming back. I played it in my mind that he is going out and will get everything he needs to open up a gambling joint. The next time these people in the bar see him, he’ll be a wealthy man, just as he was in the old days. He’ll drop money on the bar and say, you can’t have a drink unless you’re proud to drink with a black man. Then you can have a drink.  He says that, if I come back, those are the conditions.

For me that aria, you just can’t approach it in black and white. Sometimes critics see it that way but I feel that O’Neill was looking for something more universal. The same with The Emperor Jones, this is not just an angry black guy. So many people talked with me after Emperor Jones and said it didn’t matter that he was black. He could have been Jewish or any race of people who came to this country and were marginalized. That’s who Brutus Jones is and to an extent that’s who Joe Mott is. When you look at it in those terms you can resonate with more humanity. Think about it in very strict terms, a black man speaking out about black anger, you limit yourself and the universality of what O’Neill wrote. I’m never about that. I’m about expanding the message. I truly believe he wrote a universal message about a man, who happens to be black, speaking out for all the oppressed. O’Neill was giving up on the great American experience of democracy. It doesn’t work. It’s not working for certain individuals and it’s not working for Joe Mott. Here’s a guy who should have stuff but he doesn’t. Why is that? You have to work to get it but he’s speaking in very profound terms and very emotional terms about something that failed.

CG Consider that O’Neill was friends with Jack Reed and Louise Bryant when he was involved with the Provincetown Players. O’Neill was sympathetic to the radical left, the socialists and Wobblies (The International Workers of the World or I.W.W.). There are anarchists and socialists in the mix of Iceman. It was a part of the political fabric of the play. The failed and demoralized left which was crushed by Woodrow Wilson during WWI. Brian Dennehy plays a disillusioned radical.

JDT Dennehy’s character of Larry Slade has aspects of O’Neill himself. At one time Slade was involved with anarchists.

CG Not anarchists. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists. O’Neill was a socialist close to the I.W.W and they were not anarchists. 

JDT There were anarchists in the bar and they reflected friends of O’Neill. The important point is that O’Neill was saying that the American dream was not working.