The Great God Brown

Matthews Hall isn't large enough to contain the profundity that keeps its inmates awake far into the night. Every so often an exciting adolescent daydream or the insight of a bull-session is offered to a larger audience than a group of roommates, in the form of an undergraduate play.

Arthur Kopit chose a standard aspiration, one slightly more common than it is healthy: in Oh Dad, Poor Dad a father dies leaving Our Boy with millions, and presto, there is a pretty girl to pursue the active role in love-making. Our Boy can lean back and enjoy it.

Now Eugene O'Neill (poor Neil) was the Arthur Kopit of his set at Harvard. And the undergraduate philosophizing that he purged from his system in The Great God Brown is both more portentous and less superficial than Kopit's sexual fantasy. His play deals with an artist who has no capacity for work and an architect who has no flair. Dion Anthony, the artist, convinces the world (and specifically the women) that he is inspired. Brown, the architect, has a great ability to produce, but what he has to offer can only be bought, not loved.

Young playwrights, particularly when they have a great deal to say, feel an impulse to say it all at once. No exception, O'Neill indulges in every thematic permutation. Both his protagonists are made heroes, and both are villains. Dion, as played by Mitch Ryan, is less a poseur than a mixed-up kid; Brown (Richard Mulligan) is less an organization man than a hard worker. An these antithetical characters love and admire each other as a prerequisite of their hatred. O'Neill comes out both for and against his mystical idea of "talent," and for and against his image of hard work. He is opposed to the Institution and he knows the rebel is a phony. The playwright takes no stand, he takes every stand; and his saving grace is that the raison d'etre of a bull-session is argument rather than conclusion.

Through it all we hear the refrain of the semi-religious, semi-philosophical, semi-Freudian collegiate discussion. Early in the play Brown asks Dion to room with him at college, and he might just as well have added "so we can philosophize together in private, instead of detaining this audience."

It's fortunate that they do hold the audience at the Charles, because Michael Murray has successfully turned O'Neill's essay into theatrical form. Murray's accomplishment is two-fold: he turns abstract dialogue into tangible conflict (no easy chore) and he uses symbols only to represent, never to replace, the forces that alter mens lives. For example, Dion Anthony is not destroyed by drink; his drinking only suggests the various fleeting intoxicants that burn out a man's insides.

Murray's failing, however, lies in his faithfulness to O'Neill's assertive quality. He had a choice of being true to one of O'Neill's two contradictory attitudes toward himself reflected in the play: self-respect or self-contempt. In choosing the former, Murray placed his actors in the position of offering up conclusions, whereas the playwright (who later referred to the play as "a mystery") was speculating. Unlike the bull-session, which is tentative and never really ends, Murray's work is final in tone.

Mulligan was extremely handsome as Brown, and this quality greatly enhanced a role that, if played by an archetypically ugly bourgeois gentleman, would have fallen flat. His plodding was that of a sincere man, not a machinator, and his final self-destruction becomes all the more pathetic. As for Dion and his wife (Bronia Stefan), both seemed more comfortable after O'Neill got his (or their) early soliloquies out of the way.

Like all O'Neill's estranged brothers, Brown and Dion find two common parents. One is our father who art in heaven and the other is Cybel (Dora Landey), the prostitute, who loves Dion and is kept by Brown. Actually, she's less of a whore than an undergraduate impression of one: she's sage, a salty philosopher, Mother Earth and Elaine May all in one. And she likes Dion to kiss her goodbye.

O'Neill's intellectual conception of his characters is tremendously impressive; no embarrassment interferes with his accuracy in analyzing their relationships. He has written an essay, a superb one, which survives theatrically because it was grafted onto the stage with surgical skill.

The Great God Brown is a show that should be seen before it leaves town, not just because the Charles renders a very good production of a play rarely performed, but because O'Neill's real brilliance, before it drowns in its own philosophical depths, comes to the surface time and again.