THE LOWER DEPTHS
Written in 1902 and generally considered to be Gorky’s great stage work, The Lower Depths might easily have been the model for Iceman. Or it might just as easily be one half of a marvelous coincidence. Either way, it anticipates the situations and preoccupations of the O’Neill play with uncanny exactness.
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Iceman situates us in the bar at Harry Hope’s flophouse, where a small tribe of losers drink and dream their way out of an ugly reality. Unable to acknowledge their true condition, the whores style themselves “tarts” while the drunks either promise they’ll get straight tomorrow, melt into a sweetly misremembered past, or assume an air of romantic resignation.
The crucial difference between Hickey and Luka isn’t a matter of style, though. It’s a matter of vision. Far from exploding anybody’s fantasies of a better life, Luka positively nurtures them. Asserts them. Even invents them, when she has to, as a way of transcending the despair of poverty and breaking its hold on the spirit. In a lovely passage early on, Luka paints nothing less than a celestial vision for the locksmith’s dying wife; from there, it’s easy for her to accept Nastya’s sweet lies, or to encourage the actor’s dream of kicking alcohol, or to nudge the young king of the cynics–a certain Vassily Pepel–toward a sense of himself as something more than a lowlife thief. “Whatever a man believes in,” Luka says, “exists.”
