Review: In an Energized “Iceman,” the Drinks are on Denzel

If you have a good time at a production of “The Iceman Cometh,” does that mean the show hasn’t done its job? I was beaming like a tickled 2-year-old during much of George C. Wolfe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s behemoth barroom tragedy, which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with Denzel Washington more than earning his salary as its commanding star.

A sustained grin may not seem an apt response to a play in which desperate, drunken denial is the given existential condition, and suicide and murder are presented as perfectly reasonable life choices for anyone who sees the world clearly. Besides, to smile through nearly four hours of doomed rotgut-soaked souls mouthing the same hopeless blather over and over again would appear to be courting lockjaw, if not temporary insanity.

Surely, the more appropriate response and customary behavior for an “Iceman” audience member would echo that of the play’s cynic-in-chief, a disenchanted socialist (played here with ashen anger by David Morse), who says, “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”