Eugene O'Neill knew well the toll on the theatrical professional who attempts to balance artistic integrity with the need to produce a marketable commodity.  The playwright who spent his childhood as audience to a talented actor-father hacking his way through reprise after reprise as the Count of Monte Cristo developed a marked antipathy for American philistinism.  During the business boom of the 1920s, in fact, O'Neill's derision of American commercialism verged on obsession, as Virginia Floyd has pointed out (25).  The Broadway popularity of his anti-materialist plays of that decade is thus ironic; and—given O'Neill's penchant for technical experimentation which for the average theatregoer obscures rather than clarifies his themes—it is also puzzling.

 

One such experiment, The Great God Brown (1926), was the third most popular O'Neill production of the decade, exceeded in length of run only by The Emperor Jones and Strange Interlude.  Brown spent nearly one year on Broadway.  And yet, since then, producers have kept their respectful distance.

 

It is not difficult to imagine why producers have given The Great God Brown wide berth.  Even during its original run, reviewers complained of the challenge its opacity presented to audiences.  And as for scholarship, many have agreed with Edmond Gagey's long-ago admission that the play “almost defies analysis” (53).  It seems in spirit to be a fourth member of that group of plays called “historical exotics” (Raleigh 34-35), the others being The Fountain, Marco Millions and Lazarus Laughed.  Although set in the modern era, unlike the other three, its use of masks—indicating “false” and “true” personalities—is both classic (historical) and expressionistic (exotic).

 

What is more difficult to imagine is why the play was such an enormous commercial success when first presented.  After four weeks in Greenwich Village, Brown moved to Broadway, enjoying a New York run of 271 performances—this at a time when 100 nights was considered an excellent showing.  Burns Mantle selected it as one of the “Best Plays of 1925-26,” even as he qualified his choice with a comment on the play's intrigued but “mystified” following (79).  One explanation for The Great God Brown's success might well have been its reputation as an exotic.  [The story has been told and retold about the two young women who presumably did not often spend hard-earned money on the theatre.  “Gee, it's awful artistic, ain't it?” said one of Brown.  Her friend replied, “Yes, but it's good all the same” (Bowen 158).]

 

But the popular success of The Great God Brown can also be related to Broadway's vitality during the 1920s and its uncharacteristic hospitality to experiment and change—and to the concurrent disposition of the nation itself.  O'Neill was far from alone in his dour view of American materialism.  Many writers and thinkers saw serious side-effects to the presumptive cure-all of the business boom; and O'Neill's sense that “America is the greatest failure in history,” as he later told an interviewer, was based on his conviction that “we've squandered our soul by trying to possess something outside it....  We talk about the American Dream ... but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things?” (qtd. in Bowen 313).

 

The soul-sickening materialism that O'Neill saw as endemic to American capitalism is demonstrated in the story of Dion Anthony, a sensitive artist, and of Dion's friend since boyhood, William Brown, the businessman who exploits Dion's talent and finally dons the mask of Dion himself to usurp the artist's very life.  Complicated though the play is, and vast in its conceptual scope, the central conflict remains what Maya Koreneva has called the discord between “the non-conformist consciousness of the artist and the conformist middle-class mentality of the businessman” (Floyd 164).

 

O'Neill's much quoted—and some would say much-needed—letter explaining the play in the New York Evening Post (13 February 1926) calls the William Brown character

the visionless demi-god of our new materialistic myth—a Success— building his life of exterior things, inwardly empty and resourceless, an uncreative creature of superficial preordained social grooves, a by-product forced aside into slack waters by the deep main current of life-desire. (qtd. in Clark 161)

As such, Brown embodies the theme of bourgeois society's hostility to art and the artist that runs throughout so much of O'Neill's work, beginning as early as Fog (1914), which contrasts the uncreative and superficial “businessman” character with the sensitive and idealistic “poet.”

 

But businessman Brown and artist Anthony are not completely antagonistic, as Cybel, the prostitute both men visit, notes to the latter: “You like him, too!  You're brothers, I guess, somehow” (338).  Later, Brown comments, “We're getting to be like twins” (368).  It has been suggested by a number of writers that Anthony and Brown are less two separate entities than a single, “split” personality: thus the play is also concerned with the duality of human nature which gives rise to the conflict between artistic aspiration and business success.

 

Modern society's strangulation of Dion Anthony's creative self causes him to become cynical and dissipated: his mask is Pan-like, then Mephistophelean.  Unhappy himself, he makes those who love him unhappy.  Yet his “real” face, “dark, spiritual, poetic, passionately supersensitive” (310), becomes more spiritual, even saintly, though “strained and tortured” (320), as he grows older.  Dion sells his interest in the architectural firm the two men's fathers had built up.  A failed painter, he is hired by Brown to draw blueprints.  Here, his artistic spirit is further tyrannized by the commonplace commercial world.  Brown, he says,

hands me one mathematically correct barn after another and I doctor them up with cute allurements so that fools will desire to buy, sell, breed, sleep, love, hate, curse and pray in them!...  Once I dreamed of painting the wind on the sea and the skimming flight of cloud shadows over the tops of trees!  (338)

The fate of the artist among the philistines is an autobiographical theme for O'Neill, who imbued his artist characters with his own poetic sensitivity.  Dion represents, as O'Neill himself said, “creative power rendered self-destructive by complete frustration” (qtd. in Clark 171).  To utilize a phrase from O'Neill's opening stage directions, the “intolerable lifeless realistic detail[s]” (320) of Dion's life as an artist in service to business finally wear him down and he dies.

 

The focus on materialist Brown, who moves into the play's limelight when he takes the mask of the dead Dion and thus “becomes” Dion to the latter's wife, Margaret, is crucial to O'Neill's approach to the American dream of success.  Brown, explained O'Neill, envies

the creative life force in Dion—what he himself lacks....  [H]e thinks he is gaining the power to live creatively ... [but instead he is] forced to wear a mask of his Success ... before the world, as well as Dion's mask toward wife and children.  Thus Billy Brown becomes not himself to anyone.  (qtd. in Clark 161-162)

Before Brown becomes “not himself” by virtue of his becoming Dion, he is, as Dion sardonically says, “heaven-bent for success.  It's the will of Mammon!” (323).  O'Neill's description of Brown as a “capable, college-bred American business man ... with [an] engaging personality” (325) supports Dion's assessment.  But Brown, who does not wear any mask (because he has no inner self to disguise) until he assumes Dion's, is also not what he seems.

 

Likeable as businessman Brown appears at first to be, he is also calculating and greedy, a man who would possess the natural world as his birthright.  Brown takes as his mistress Cybel, the prostitute-earth-mother named for Cybele, the Phrygian counterpart to Rhea, Mother of the Gods, and called “Mother Earth” by Dion (339).  In the main, Cybel represents the relationship of art and nature, but she is seen by Brown as something to purchase and to “possess ... exclusively”—an attitude at least suggestive of capitalistic hubris, if not of commercial exploitation of the earth's bounty.  As Travis Bogard puts it, Brown is “the secure God of a materialistic society, an assured possessor of all he surveys” (275).

 

For Brown, Cybel represents ownership and commerce; for Dion, love and the life force.  The idea that capitalist materialism, which considers both art and nature in commercial terms, corrupts and destroys the relationship between life and art can be extrapolated from the ménage of Dion, Cybel and Brown.

 

Brown also “buys” and exploits the artistic talents of his quondam boyhood chum.  Small-minded and envious from childhood, when (Dion recalls) he “sneaked up behind when I was drawing a picture in the sand he couldn't draw and hit me on the head ... kicked out my picture and laughed when I cried” (346), Brown, in adulthood, steals Dion's creativity by signing his own name to Dion's architectural designs (338).  But Billy Brown, the play suggests, only partly represents the soulless interests of a materialistic society that abruptly destroys creative impulses or slowly drains the artist of inspiration.  Brown is also a casualty (in O'Neill's words, a “creature of superficial preordained grooves”) of a self-righteous bourgeois culture frightened by the aberrations that define full life.  Brown is “secretly ashamed” of his brutal boyhood act; but, his humanity suffocated by social pressures that will not let him accept his demons as his own, he cannot “acknowledge” his shame (346).  Thus, Brown becomes the “good boy, the good friend, the good man”—the empty shell.  Brown, too, is destroyed in the end by a society that cannot embrace life, but rather must “quiet [its] fears, cast out [its] devils” in order to “sleep soundly” (372) in its glib, complacent self-satisfaction.

 

Brown is the head of a construction-qua-architecture firm that has upgraded itself in the second generation.  O'Neill's choice of architecture as a profession for Brown and for Dion speaks both to notions of the American ideal of success and to America's successful subjugation of art to commercialism.

 

Brown's father had encouraged young Billy to study architecture:

FATHER. ... a first-rate, number-one architect!...  What I've always wished I could have been myself!  Only I never had the opportunity.  But Billy— ... Anthony, Brown and Son, architects and builders—instead of contractors and builders!  [O'Neill's italics]

 

MOTHER. And we won't lay sidewalks—or dig sewers—ever again? (308)

The Brown family is typical of the bourgeois business mentality that seeks continual advancement and accretion.  The parents see in Billy's future, not artistic fulfilment, but a new professional status that will expand and dignify their blue-collar construction firm.  And the elder Brown's dream of success is realized: his son Billy prospers.  But in the latter's hands the art and science of architecture become pedestrian, a mere exercise in conventionality.

 

Architecture, to Billy, is not the ancient art of creating cathedrals and palaces for the glory of God and the expression of the human spirit.  Nor is it the modern science of making buildings to be both beautiful and useful, in harmony with their surroundings and synchronistic with the spirit of the age.  Billy's mind, as he says, “doesn't seem to run that way” (326).  As Dion later remarks, Brown “couldn't design a cathedral without it looking like the First Supernatural Bank!” (348).  And however many “stoop-shouldered” draftspeople he may employ to aid him (354), Brown's designs remain “cold,” “spare,” and tomb-like (358)—empty of the soul of true art.

 

O'Neill's choice of architecture as the business milieu for Dion and Billy is far from random.  American architecture, as a business, was booming in the 1920s, and architects were practicing an increasingly lucrative craft.  At its best, twenties architecture was inspired by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and supported as an art form by civic groups and philanthropists.  But at its worst, it was a collaborative and anonymous effort that resulted in dreary office buildings and interchangeable suburban bungalows.  In this way, architecture is perhaps most like theatre: at its best, a nurturer of genius; at its worst, caterer to dull popular taste.  Both art forms, in their shared need for large amounts of capital to achieve their ends, are unusually susceptible to the demands of mediocrity.  (While much has been made of the pagan-ascetic duality in the character of Dion, named for Dionysus and St. Anthony, there is seldom if ever any mention of Dionysus as the Greek god of the theatre.  O'Neill doubtless recalled western drama's origins in Dionysiac ritual when he chose the name for his artist-protagonist.)  The Great God Brown, suffused with allegory as it is, does not fail to make its point about dramatic art in its reference to the commercialization of architecture.

 

What happens when the architect-businessman Brown takes on the persona of the artist-architect Dion?  The transfer of personality accomplished, Brown cannot transfer to himself the true soul of the artist that he seeks.  The “split” personality becomes triune: at home with Margaret, Brown is Dion, but a content and loving Dion; at the office he wears an “exact likeness of his [former] face ... the self-assured success” (355); while in private his own, real face has become “ravaged and haggard ... tortured and distorted by the demon of Dion's mask” (357).  Brown's designs now have the proper warmth and outward distinction that the builders of churches and capitol buildings desire; but inwardly they are corrupt.  From behind the mask of Dion, Brown exults:

Here's a wondrous fair capitol!  The design would do just as well for a Home for Criminal Imbeciles!  Yet to them, such is my art, it will appear to possess a pure common-sense, a fat-bellied finality, as dignified as the suspenders of an assemblyman!  Only to me will the pompous façade reveal ... the wearily ironic grin of Pan (365).

But when he reveals his own “tortured” face, he is penitent:

Ugly!  Hideous!  Despicable!  Why must the demon in me pander to cheapness—then punish me with self-loathing and life-hatred?  Why am I not strong enough to perish—or blind enough to be content? (366)

It is the “real” Brown who has become most like Dion.  The businessman experiences the pain of the defeated artist but not the joy of the creative one.

 

The desire to wear both the mask of success and the mask of the artist, O'Neill suggests, is part of the human struggle.  The conflict between spiritual and temporal, between inner and outer self, bisects human nature; and the result, for both the Dions and the Browns, is a torturous sense of incompleteness, a longing for a lost identity.  When Brown finally casts aside Dion's distorted, satanic mask and becomes regenerated, fused, as “Dion Brown,” he is, in fact, martyred.  Accused of the murder of William Brown, he is cut down by police bullets.  He was, Cybel says of his corpse, “Man!” (375).

 

O'Neill's social message, certainly not the least of The Great God Brown's obscurities, is, finally, a condemnation of a culture that is responsible for both the torment of the visionary and the contentment of the benighted.  O'Neill not only addresses the destruction of the artistic impulse by a commercial culture, but presents a culture itself bent on self-destruction.

 

Brown represents not only “the businessman,” the agent of a bourgeois society hostile to art, but also Everyman (Berkelman 609), whose human potential is snuffed out by the very society he represents.  His Babbitt-like consciousness, which prevents self-knowledge until he takes on the mask of his other self, is molded by the conditions of his birth.  His material success robs him of the ability to affirm life.  Although bourgeois and not proletarian, Brown is in many ways like Yank in The Hairy Ape, who, bereft of harmony with the natural world, is destroyed by his yearning to “belong” in a capitalist society mechanically unaware of its own destructive tendencies.

 

Virginia Floyd, in discussing European appreciation of O'Neill, writes of the American “dilemma of the split self, the materialist-businessman/ idealist-poet dichotomy” (31).  That O'Neill's poetically idealistic critique of the materialist businessman achieved commercial success in the era of Babbittry is notably ironic, but refreshing as well.  If the young working women who thought The Great God Brown artistic but “good all the same” were representative of those who supported the play with their patronage, scores of theatregoers may well have found their idealist-poet sides the healthier for the experience!

 

WORKS CITED

 

Berkelman, Robert.  “O'Neill and Everyman.”  South Atlantic Quarterly, 58 (Fall 1959): 609-616.

 

Bogard, Travis.  Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill.  New York: Oxford UP, 1972.

 

Bowen, Croswell.  The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O'Neill.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

 

Clark, Barrett H.  Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays.  New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1929.

 

Floyd, Virginia, ed.  Eugene O'Neill: A World View.  New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.

 

Gagey, Edmond.  The Revolution in American Drama.  New York: Columbia UP, 1947.

 

Mantle, Burns.  The Best Plays of 1925-26.  New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1926.

 

O'Neill, Eugene.  The Great God Brown.  Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill.  New York: Random House, 1932.

 

Raleigh, John Henry.  The Plays of Eugene O'Neill.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965.