The Great God Brown by Eugene O'Neill

First published: 1926, in The Great God Brown, The Fountain, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Other Plays

First produced: 1926, at the Greenwich Village Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: The East Coast of the United States

Principal Characters:

• William “Billy” A. Brown, an architect
• Dion Anthony, an artist
• Margaret, Dion’s wife and later William’s
• Cybel, an earth mother-prostitute

The Play

The prologue to The Great God Brown takes place outside a high school during the annual commencement dance. Billy Brown’s father, partner in a construction firm with Dion Anthony’s father, anticipates that Billy will study architecture in college. Dion, wearing the mask of a reckless, sensual young man, is secretly extremely sensitive and anxious to create a self of his own unlike that of his stolid father. Margaret, adored by Billy, rejects him and is attracted instead to Dion’s mask; when Dion takes it off, however, hoping to be loved for his essential self, she is confused and frightened. He replaces his mask, acknowledging that he needs her to be his “skin” even if she will never really know him.

Seven years later, in act 1, Dion and Margaret are married and have three nondescript sons. The Pan mask has become Mephistophelian and Dion’s real face more ascetic. Because he has exhausted his father’s inheritance, he allows Margaret to arrange with his rival Billy, now head of his own dead father’s firm, to hire him as a draftsman. Billy’s architectural designs are conventional and unimaginative. Envious of Dion’s talent as well as of his marriage to Margaret, Billy hires him. Dion can reveal his spirituality and sadness only to Cybel, nominally a young prostitute but symbolically an earth-mother figure. When Billy finds Dion at Cybel’s, Dion must put on his public mask again. Frustrated in his attempts to use art to see God, Dion resigns himself to serving the Great God Mr. Brown instead.

In act 2, seven years later, Brown, whose envy has made him a regular patron of Cybel, is puzzled by her summing up her preference for Dion by saying simply, “He’s alive!” However, she suspects that she will never see Dion again, so close is he to collapse. Dion tries once more to show his real face to Margaret and is rejected as before. He goes to Billy, whom he accuses of having stolen his “creative life,” knowing that Billy alone “couldn’t design a cathedral without it looking like the First Supernatural Bank!” Dion dies, having willed his mask to Billy, who wears it in order to have Margaret; she thinks that he is Dion grown younger.

In act 3, Billy has to pretend to his workmen that he has fired Dion, yet he wears Dion’s mask when he is at home with Margaret. The terrible tension that results from this duplicity distorts his own inner face. The Dion part of his role makes him realize that he has only achieved “love by mistaken identity.” Feeling “pursued by God, and by myself,” he begins to talk to his mask as if Dion were still alive. He has made Margaret happy by giving her a rejuvenated Dion, but he himself can only suffer when she reminisces regarding her lifelong contempt for Billy Brown. Playing the role of Dion, he says cryptically to her, “Mr. Brown is now safely in hell.”

In act 4, Billy’s initial soliloquy reveals that he is nearing a breakdown. He has designed a state capitol that even he now recognizes “would do just as well for a Home for Criminal Imbeciles.” He wishes that he had the strength to destroy the design but struggles for an honest reconciliation of, or an end to, his divided self. As Brown, he assures Margaret that, far from working Dion to death, it is he himself “who is to die.” To a committee that has commissioned the capitol design, he admits that it is entirely Dion’s but an insult to everyone’s intelligence. He tears the plan into pieces; shortly thereafter, as Dion, he says that he will paste the parts together again: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!” When he tells them that Brown is dead, however, they think he has murdered Billy. Solemnly they lay the mask of Brown on the sofa.

Cybel comes to Billy in his home, recognizing that he is now Dion Brown, soulful sufferer though also an alleged murderer who must flee for his life. As he tries to leave, he is shot. Cybel comforts him in his last moments, assuring him of eternal peace: “Our Father Who Art!” When the police ask her his name, she replies, “Man!” The captain, uncomprehending, asks, “How d’yuh spell it?”

In an epilogue, Margaret, who “knows her life-purpose well accomplished” but feels at the same time “a bit empty and comfortless,” releases her two grown sons to their own lives. They are about to become strangers to her. She kisses the mask of Dion whom she addresses as her lover, husband, and boy. She little realizes that she has never known the real Dion.

Dramatic Devices

Partly because scenes in The Great God Brown alternate so rapidly, returning to the same few places—office, home, Cybel’s apartment—in a rhythm indicative of Dion and Billy’s living harassed double lives, Eugene O’Neill’s directions call for quick-change backdrops, rather than fixed or revolving scenery. The relative insignificance of place in the play also permits him to focus audience attention on the interior lives of his characters. To provide them with an experience of the sometimes dazzling complexities within each seemingly singular self, he developed the use of masks far beyond any earlier dependence on them. Not only Dion and Billy but also Margaret and even Cybel have masks, although in the case of the women the masks are simpler, less changeable. O’Neill was familiar with the use of masks among the ancient Greeks, but his purpose was not theirs. The Greeks were concerned with practical visibility in an amphitheater and with implied universality, when they put outsize masks on their performers. O’Neill’s interest, by contrast, lay in dramatizing mass anonymity in The Hairy Ape (pr., pb. 1922) and conflicting layers of the inner man in The Great God Brown, far beyond the triangle of ego-id-superego already introduced into psychological studies by Sigmund Freud.

O’Neill was determined to invent whole new ways of deepening theatrical commonplaces. His awareness of the actor as sacrificing personal identity to the role that he or she plays reinforced O’Neill’s vision of inner-outer divisions in people in general. Similarly, dependence of the acting troupe on cosmetics as a form of conventional mask, to help establish this alternative identity, became an opportunity for O’Neill, in effect, to place masks beneath removable masks. The makeup used to delineate the progressive spiritual conflicts inside Dion and Billy differs from the external masks largely through the flexibility given to that makeup by facial expression. Never before and never again did O’Neill deploy dramatic masks so elaborately. Their use demanded much skillful handling on the part of the actor, since awkwardness would have brought laughter from an audience. Equally, they demanded a willingness on the part of audiences to submit to such unconventional devices in the name of greater intimacy and understanding of the characters.

Critical Context

After The Great God Brown, Eugene O’Neill turned his inventive mind to related experiments. In Strange Interlude (pr., pb. 1928) he tried what might be called “voice masks”: Each character had a public voice that participated in normal dialogue and a private voice that gave the audience access to the inner thoughts of that character. The soliloquy, used for exactly this type of revelation, was a well-worn device, but it had never been used so extensively before. Despite the risk of prolonging his play by this added dimension, the device was necessary to satisfy O’Neill’s desire to dramatize the conflict between every person’s inner and outer worlds, as he already had managed to do with face masks in The Great God Brown. The “voice masks” were not so difficult for actors to manage as the face masks had been; the audience, too, could more easily accustom itself to the experimental device used in Strange Interlude.

In Days Without End (pr., pb. 1934) the playwright directs that one role be played by two actors, in order to convey the same division of worlds, though here they are finally resolved into one. In More Stately Mansions (pb. 1964), the “voice masks” appear briefly again, in act 2, with extensive soliloquies or asides given by a woman, her husband, and his mother, to expose unspoken dimensions of their fierce rivalry for domestic authority. The exhaustive use of masks in The Great God Brown, however, marked the climax of expressionistic experimentation for O’Neill.

Even as O’Neill turned to more surface realism in his later plays, his basic vision did not alter. Many of his works, early and late, are based on the supposition that it is humankind’s ability to dream that separates it from animal life and offers some hope for an afterlife. Being no romantic, however, O’Neill understood the suffering imposed on humans by that very ability to dream and devoted his most important plays, therefore, to an attempt to distinguish among creative, destructive, and neutral protective dreaming. All these elements are discernible in The Great God Brown.

Sources for Further Study

Carpenter, Frederick I. “The Great God Brown.” In Eugene O’Neill. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Engel, Edwin A. “Saint and Satan.” In The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Estrin, Mark W., ed. Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

Falk, Doris V. Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretative Study of the Plays. 2d ed. New York: Gordian Press, 1982.

Floyd, Virginia. “The Great God Brown.” In The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment. New York: F. Ungar, 1985.

Frenz, Horst. “Desire, Masks, and ’Beautiful Philosophy.’” In Eugene O’Neill. Translated by Helen Sebba. New York: F. Ungar, 1971.

Houchin, John. The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

O’Neill, Eugene. “Memoranda on Masks.” In O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill et al. New York: New York University Press, 1961.