Word: dion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great God Brown, currently being revived by Manhattan's New Phoenix Company, is a compendium of these aspects of the lesser O'Neill. It is a drama of split personality. The protagonists, Dion Anthony (John McMartin) and William Brown (John Glover), are physically two but psychically one. The play is a duel of opposing forces within the same being. Anthony stands for Art untrammeled by mundane affairs; Brown for the etiolated Babbittry of Commerce. But Dion is himself divided, his first name standing for Dionysius, the creative-erotic life force, and his last name Anthony for "a saint...
...basic story line is simple enough. Dion Anthony and William Brown are high school friends and both are in love with a girl named Margaret. Anthony wins the girl but messes up his life while Brown becomes an intensely driven and successful architect. Not only do they share the same mistress, Cybel, but when Anthony falls on hard times Brown gives him work ghost-designing important assignments. Anthony's impossibly sensitive nature drives him to drink and death. Brown has what he's waited a lifetime for, the chance to assume Anthony's role as husband, father and creative designer...
WHILE THAT'S A SYNOPSIS of the play as it realistic drama, there is in fact little realistic about it. O'Neill won't let his characters have their own personalities and foists symbolic roles upon them. As he confesses in the program notes. "Dion Anthony is the creative pagan acceptance of life fighting eternal war with the masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity as represented by Saint Anthony:" Margaret is the "eternal girl woman with a virtuous simplicity of instinct, properly oblivious to everything but the means to her end of maintaining the race;" Cybel is "an incarnation...
While iron-stomached culture hawks might salivate in the presence of such gaudy symbols, it only makes the cast's eternal fight so much more valiant. They have no choices but to flash around their stylized plastic masks and they do so with considerable cleverness. Only John McMartin as Dion Anthony has difficulty finessing his way through the surrealistic script. The New Phoenix's leading lady. Katherine Helmond, does well in the role of Margaret, and Marilyn Sokol is fine as Cybel, although offhand it's difficult to picture how an Earth Mother should be. Best of all is John...
...Regents sang "Runaround," and Dion recorded "Runaround Sue" with "Runaway Girl" as a flip side. But who sang about a girl who ran away and said he wished she were there by him to end his misery? Hint: He recorded the song while he was on contract with...