Here’s Broadway’s pipe dream: it’s still a place for serious American drama. This season has offered only three new American plays (three and a half if John Lithgow’s storytelling earns a partial credit), serious and not. They’ve all closed. But Broadway is still a place for revivals, especially if those revivals are star-spangled and scheduled for a limited run, which explains why Denzel Washington has poured himself into a flash, droopy suit and loped on to the ramshackle set of Eugene O’Neill’s epic downer, The Iceman Cometh.

Written at the end of his life, The Iceman Cometh was a bleak reprieve from the even bleaker world of Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play sent O’Neill spiraling back to his days at Jimmy the Priest’s, the seaport saloon where he’d tried to kill himself in an upstairs room. With his typically on-the-nose irony, O’Neill renamed the place Harry Hope’s and populated it with a gang of sloppy no-hopers, all of them clinging to illusions – what O’Neill called pipe dreams – of what their lives could be once they put down the bottle.

When the lights rise – the lighting gets sillier, but the first scene has a dyspeptic Edward Hopper gleam – it’s the end of the night or early in the morning and most of the mob has passed out in their chairs. (Later in the evening you can see a few people in the audience repeating the trick.) They’re resting before two highly anticipated events – the celebration of saloon owner Harry’s birthday (Harry is played here by Colm Meaney) and the arrival of Hickey (Washington), the charismatic salesman who always stands them all to a drink, what Michael Potts’s Joe calls “cyanide cut with carbolic acid to give it a mellow flavor”.

But when Hickey arrives, he has horrifying news – he’s on the wagon. What’s more, he’s had an epiphany. He has managed to rid himself of his own pipe dreams and he makes it his mission to convert the rest of the bar to his faith, encouraging them to follow through on their own dreams – to get married, to get sober, to get a job – so that they can let those dreams die, waking to a new reality.

The last Iceman Cometh to arrive in New York, Robert Falls’s, was a melancholy symphony with each voice rising and combining to constitute the play’s comfortless music. That’s not present in Wolfe’s production, a series of solos, many of them from the horn section. Cuts have been made to the play – it runs nearly four hours, an hour less than other productions – and maybe this has harmed the cohesion, the lived-in-ness. One experiences less a world and more a room full of actors, mostly good ones, each waiting for a chance to monologue.

The big monologue belongs to Washington’s Hickey – it’s a doozy about the life and death of his wife. For most of it, Washington is playing Washington, letting his good looks and irrepressible charm do most of the character work, though the play’s most exciting moments are when he lets that charm falter (something he’s also been exploring in his recent film work, too) showing something uglier and more ravaged underneath. Hickey’s terror when he suspects he may have his new religion all wrong is one of the few moments of the play that one sees rather than feels.

The play is a difficult one. It’s a roughly mixed cocktail of poetry, psychodrama and bombast that’s only rarely wise to itself. But like O’Neill’s best works it has a power that outpaces the scenes and the lines. Here, the punches are sometimes packed and sometimes pulled. It’s a drink that won’t knock you out.