Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, is one of the more challenging works in the American dramatic canon. Its down-on-their-luck characters, mostly men, are steeped in life’s difficulties – steeped figuratively and literally, as alcohol is refuge and scourge of many of those found in the saloon where the play takes place in the New York City of 1912. The work challenges playgoers not only with its dark themes onstage, but with its real-time length: The Iceman Cometh has four acts, and often clocks in at around five hours running time.