By BROOKS ATKINSON

What Mr. O’Neill has succeeded in doing in “The Great God Brown,” now to be seen at the Greenwich Village Theatre, is obviously more important than what he has not succeeded n doing.  He has not made himself clear.  But he has placed within the reach of the stage finer shades of beauty, more delicate nuances of truth and more passionate qualities of emotion than we can discover in any other single modern play.  The symbolism inherent in all his plays is now carried to its ultimate conclusion; dramatic substance is spun into fragile bands of meaning; the abstract conflicts of life are transmuted and thrice refined.  But use of masks, personalities are distinguished from appearances; two realities are murdered and lost, while one distorted image of being, a surface mask, remains apparently immortal.  From such piercing, critical probing of the soul I this drama constructed.

All this is patent in the current performance without being consistently intelligible.  From the Olympian point of view, rather than the Broadway, one of Mr. O’Neill’s chief signs of strength is his absorption in the ideal as opposed to the practical.  It is not his fashion to bargain with his dreams in the interests of black and white playwrighting.  And now that he has striven to increase the stature of drama so that it may catch the full richness of his emotion, he puts a responsibility upon the audience too great and far too flattering.  For two acts “The Great God Brown” makes its esoteric points with translucent clarity, and meanwhile pours a flood of powerful feeling across the footlights.  When the masks for each individual increase from one to two in the remaining acts, and quick shifts are made from one to the other or from mask to real flesh, and the play cuts loose entirely from reality, the result is quite bewildering.  Mr. O’Neill will not blame his audience for begging the key to all this diffusion of figure; an explanatory note in the program might easily make thorough understanding possible.  Indeed, if every line in the play did not ring with passion and sincerity, the complexity of this mode of expression might engender impatience in the mind of the playgoer.  Even now it will certainly give rise to choleric differences of opinion.  But a playwright may do whatever he chooses; the audience can register only its approval or disdain.  In the presence of so much genuine honesty of purpose, one willingly concedes Mr. O’Neill the benefit of the doubt and merely observes that “The Great God Brown” is in large part inarticulate.

To place within the limits of a newspaper review an intelligible account of the details of so involved a play is, of course, quite impossible.  On the surface, “The Great God Brown” is a tragedy of love.  Bill Brown lovers Margaret.  She, however, loves Dion Anthony, and marries him.  It is Mr. O’Neill’s contention that she loves not the real Dion Anthony, a sensitive, bruised being, but a distorted image of Dion, a mocking, cynical surface appearance represented by Dion’s mask.  Beyond these simple facts, the substance of “The Great God Brown” rests within the various personalities that come and go by clapping on or removing the masks.  Only one of these personalities remains virtually constant – the mask of Dion that Margaret marries, and that she loves even when ultimately Billy Brown wears it.  Once in the prologue Dion removes it in the ecstasy of passion; but Margaret recoils.  She does not recognize him nor trust him again until he wears the appearance to which she is attached.  Once long after their marriage Dion reveals his true self to her hungrily.  But Margaret draws back affrighted.  She never sees him unmasked again.  Only a prostitute, the symbol of Mother Earth, sees Dion unmasked and keeps unmasked herself in his presence.

By such a device Mr. O’Neill multiplies the varieties of human emotion latent in his theme, and suffuses the whole in affecting tenderness.  The contrasts between Dion seeking release for his soul agony in the sublime majesty of Scriptural instruction and Dion protecting himself with perverse cynicism in the presence of his wife are indescribably poignant.  Complications set in, however, when Dion dies and wills his mask to Billy Brown, who has all these years cherished his love for Margaret.  When Billy claps on Dion’s mask, Margaret is quite deceived.  And happier, for behind the familiar appearance is more warmth and youth than she had known in Dion.  Up to this point, Billy has gone through the play unmasked.  But now, in addition to Dion’s mask, he fashions another mask representing himself in the familiar status of successful business man.  With bewildering versatility he changes from one to the other according to his absorption in business or domestic affairs, while the real Billy, in the flesh, unmasked, fades and finally dies.  To recount further complications in this theme would confuse an already confused summary of the play.  Mr. O’Neill has wrung every drop of passion from his drama and characterization.

In the larger sphere of form “The Great God Brown:” is a work of art, with a beginning, a middle and an end, with character development, and with a penetrating criticism of life.  By predicating the tragedy with a prologue that introduces the parents of the main characters, and by appending to it an epilogue that reveals Margaret as a middle-aged woman and her three boys now grown to maturity, Mr. O’Neill gives his play the sweep of universality and the continuity of successive generations.  Nor is the play itself the chronicle of three individuals.  In the concluding act, when Billy Brown has breathed his last, and investigating policeman demands the victim’s name.  “Man,” says Cybel conclusively.   And “How d’yah spell it?” the policeman demands as the final words pf the play.  For Mr. O’Neill does not write in one key.  In the dialogue, as well as in the characterization, he modulates his theme freely.  From passages of winged poetry he shifts quickly to mordant irony; from the abstract he passes to the concrete without missing a beat.  And the implications of “The Great God Brown” carry us far afield among the cruelest uncertainties of pleading, skeptical mind.  Obscure or clear, “The Great God Brown” is packed with memorable substance.

In a less sensitive performance, the play would be quite beyond human understanding.  The principal actors have been all well chosen.  The personal radiance of Miss Hogarth in the part of Margaret contrasts wonderfully with the phlegmatic countenance of her mask.  Similarly in the part of Dion, Mr. (Robert) Keith embues his acting of the real man with an interior distress that sets off the surface mockery of his mask.  Mr. (Edward) Harrigan gives body to the part of Billy Brown.  As Cybel, the prostitute and the symbol of Mother Earth, Miss (Anne) Shoemaker plays with an extraordinary pity, understanding and gentleness.