ABSTRACT
The power of location in plays requires that the playwrights put their characters in environments that test them. It can be a place that triggers unconscious childhood memories, or can involve climate, politics, economics, or transition. The location is both claustrophobic and crushing, and going through the objects—an old sculling oar, a bed, a pair of ice skates—forces the brothers, as Arthur Miller says, to demand “of one another what was forfeited to time.” After the playwright decides on the characters that will inhabit the play, the next decision is location. If the play is deliverately written without specificity of location, the details, of necessity, must be posited in the landscape and be integral to the axis of the play. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, the action takes place at a bar in New London, Connecticut, home territory for the playwright.
