The Theater: Old Play on Broadway, Oct. 19, 1959

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...

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