Drama of Souls

By T.E.Kalem

THE GREAT GOD BROWN

by EUGENE O'NEILL

A playwright's middle plays sometimes resemble a man's middle age. He has lost something of the initial impetus, vigor and enthusiasm of his youth. He has also become somewhat skeptical of the ardent loves and rock-sure beliefs that are the trusted absolutes of the young. Yet he is not old enough in years for the long view, the contemplative wisdom which encompasses the entire life span of existence.

For Eugene O'Neill, the early period was his one-act sea plays. O'Neill's almost mystic affinity for the sea was probably the only untormented love that his lonely, brooding, haunted spirit ever knew. O'Neill's late period, in which he exorcised the ghosts of the past and reached commanding stature as a dramatist, is pre-eminently represented by The Iceman Cometh (his vision at the approach of death) and Long Day's Journey into Night (the reconciliation with his family which he could not achieve while his family lived).

Flaws. The rest of O'Neill's plays fall in between, and they exhibit his flaws rather than his virtues. For instance, ideas were like banana peels to O'Neill; he always seems to be picking himself up after having slipped on some thought of Nietzsche's or Strindberg's or Freud's. He was addicted to dramatic stunts--drums in The Emperor Jones, mannequins in The Hairy Ape, masks in The Great God Brown. Something of a Broadway swell and a nifty dresser, he aspired to be a flashy man-about-words, a self-described poet, no less, and some of his highfalutin attempts along these lines make one cringe.

The Great God Brown, currently being revived by Manhattan's New Phoenix Company, is a compendium of these aspects of the lesser O'Neill. It is a drama of split personality. The protagonists, Dion Anthony (John McMartin) and William Brown (John Glover), are physically two but psychically one. The play is a duel of opposing forces within the same being. Anthony stands for Art untrammeled by mundane affairs; Brown for the etiolated Babbittry of Commerce. But Dion is himself divided, his first name standing for Dionysius, the creative-erotic life force, and his last name Anthony for "a saint in the desert, exorcising a demon." In plot terms, Anthony goes to work for Brown and loses his creative urge and his life. But to secure Anthony's widow (Catherine Helmond) Brown must don Anthony's mask to appropriate Anthony's passion. Thus a transfer of identities is completed. Finally, each character's mask is a device for social camouflage. Worn, it is protective armor against the hostility and misunderstanding of the world. Dropping it marks the true and vulnerable self.

Even the best efforts of Director Hal Prince, Actors McMartin and Glover, who draws a particularly sensitive portrait of Brown, cannot keep the play from being an abstract, muddy and confusing affair. What is affecting, and occasionally arresting about it is O'Neill's attempt, as he wrote George Jean Nathan, "to dig at the roots of the sickness of today as I feel it--the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one..." Despite or because of his lapsed Catholicism, the death of the old God left O'Neill desolate. In The Great God Brown and other plays of O'Neill's middle period, that agony bestows an enduring honor on what are otherwise aesthetic failures.

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