when we heard them discussing this with brian taking on the role of larry slade, i wrote an email to brian and said i would love to play hickey and here's my reasoning and fortunately he responded positively and we got together and started discussing how we would do it. >> rose: how do you see hickey? >> well, you know when i read the play when i was a kid and i had gotten a collection of eugene o'neill plays and i read "the iceman cometh," i was drawn to the character of hickey because of the description that o'neill writes that sounded a little like me. he describes him as short and roley poley, a button nose and twinkle in his eye. he always writes these very long descriptions of characters rather too specific for everyone to live up to. but what he created i thought, and what i was bringing up to bob in my email was, you know, it's defined by jason robards. he was the gold standard. in 1956, off broadway, they defined who the character is. and it's much darker than say, the original production in 1946 and jason brought this mischievous ma leaf lens and kind of other-worldly quali