Sitting at a table in the cramped upstairs offices of the Goodman Theatre, Jerome Kilty doesn’t look much like the character he plays in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. In the role of the pathetic, pipe-dreaming saloon keeper Harry Hope, Kilty looks burned-out and bedraggled; his thinning hair falls wispily over his forehead, his lips smack with alcoholic dehydration over a scruffy beard, and his eyes are dull and peevish. But offstage, one afternoon before a performance of the four-and-a-half-hour drama, Kilty cuts a neat, trim, alert appearance. His eyes twinkle as he recalls famous friends or passes disdainful comment on the Method style of acting.
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This season marks the 40th anniversary of Kilty’s Broadway debut. But at least from his teenage years, he recalls with a shrug, “I was always interested in sort of showing off.” As a high school student in San Francisco, he was part of a debating team that included Carol Channing. He got his first serious dramatic training in his early 20s, during the waning days of World War II. Stationed in England, he served as a U.S. Air Force navigator and rose to the rank of captain. When the war ended in Europe, American troops were advised of openings in British schools. “I was the ranking officer in my squadron then, so I could send people to these openings,” Kilty says. “One day a notice came in from the Guildhall School of Drama in London. So I sent myself!”
After the war he attended Harvard University on the GI Bill. When he didn’t get cast in the school shows, he founded his own theater company, attracting other actors by putting a classified ad in the Harvard Crimson. The group took up residence in Cambridge’s famed Brattle Theatre. “We were one of the first regional theaters in the country,” Kilty says. Young actors such as Albert Marre, Nancy Marchand, Peggy Cass, and Cavada Humphrey–whom Kilty married–were soon joined by better-known professionals as a result of the anticommunist paranoia then beginning to infect show business.
After a world premiere in Berlin in 1959, with Elisabeth Bergner playing Mrs. Campbell, Dear Liar came to Broadway in 1960, with the legendary Katharine Cornell playing opposite Brian Aherne’s Shaw. (Cornell learned of the unproduced play, says Kilty, from her neighbor Lillian Hellman, with whom Kilty shared an agent.) Over the years, the play proved a durable and tourable star vehicle. Kilty and his wife performed it many times on the road and on Broadway in the early 60s; Dame Peggy Ashcroft starred in it in London, Jean Cocteau translated it into French, and Luchino Visconti produced it in Italy.
Lately he’s begun to bloom as an O’Neill interpreter. “I never was very fond of O’Neill until maybe six years ago,” he says. That was when he starred with Kate Nelligan in A Moon for the Misbegotten on Broadway. The challenge in playing O’Neill, he says, is that “it seems that he’s writing in the vernacular and then in fact he’s not. And unless you use his exact phrasing, you’re lost.” In the devastating final act of Goodman’s Iceman, Kilty utters a series of subtle variations on the basic statement, “All we want is to pass out in peace,” offering a choruslike response to the long revelatory monologue delivered by Brian Dennehy. “The relentlessness of the repetition is difficult, and it’s got to be done right,” says Kilty. “People do repeat what they say, especially in lives that become enmeshed with each other. Repetition is sometimes all you have.”
