Old Play on Broadway

The Great God Brown (by Eugene O'Neill) stems from the period in the '20s when O'Neill was making Broadway history as an experimenter, while sometimes running into trouble as a playwright. With Freud raising the blinds on the unconscious, and expressionism opening a crazy-shaped door on the unrealistic, O'Neill grew bolder in his broodings--and more confused. In The Great God Brown, his psychological quarry was the split personality, his technical gimmick the use of masks. Turning a masked face to the world, Dion Anthony (Fritz Weaver) seems Panlike, violent, blasphemous, sexually magnetic. Without his mask, Anthony quivers and quakes, is reverent toward God and repellent to women. Dion's school friend Billy Brown (Robert Lansing) grows up decent and successful but frustrated. He envies Dion's personality, craves Dion's wife, and, at Dion's death, snatches the mask that made Dion unstable and violent.

In Brown, O'Neill tackled something formidably complex: both the conflict within a divided personality and divided selves clashing with one another. The use of masks has visual value; the sudden shifts in character and the transference of personality have theatrical force. But the conflicts that concerned O'Neill are among the eternal conflicts of stage drama. They are more rewarding when the audience must distinguish the face from the mask, or when the two are not easily distinguishable. Theatrical without being dramatic, O'Neill created men with two profiles but without any face.

With its prolixity and banal poetizing, The Great God Brown is as heavy with fog as it is lacking in flesh. Opening its seventh season with so tough a challenge, the Phoenix Theater could not meet it in production. As the best way of sustaining interest, Director Stuart Vaughan makes use of the stylized and the histrionic. Now and then, the tricks are vivid, but the gaudy orchestration only stresses the hollowness of the music.

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