There's a moment in The Iceman Cometh - or there was a moment, theater being as evanescent as beer bubbles - when Kevin Spacey finally arrives onstage, and you couldn't be happier to see him. The star is here, a bit of hope come to Harry Hope's bar, and the Broadway audience feels it every bit as much as Eugene O'Neill's booze-addled dreamers. Part of the reason for this is that we don't feel legit theater is quite so legit these days without the thrilling proximity of a Hollywood face. And part of the reason is Spacey's face itself, that big empty canvas of a forehead, the refracting eyes and those dimply lines cut around his mouth like a pair of ironic parentheses. It's a face that has often seemed tricky on-screen, a face designed to make you wonder, Who is deluding whom? But Spacey says he no longer wants to stick with film roles that have him playing "seven steps ahead of everyone else". His manic turn in the new film American Beauty is a move to this direction, and Iceman was a warm-up of sorts. Says Spacey, "What I found most beautiful in all the messages O'Neill cis throwing out there is that it's OK to have your pipe dreams. You just should be in on your own jokes."

Our own jokes! What a harrowingly concise description of life, and as bleak as it sounds, it's Spacey's talent to make pipe dreams seem heroically...OK. He says that what drew him to Iceman was the idea of playing someone who loved deeply the flawed chacracters around him. "For me that was such a monumentally beautiful idea, to love people that much, even as confusing as love can be." Hell, if there's absolution for these losers, maybe there will be some for us. Which is why were so glad to see the guy in the first place.

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