I came upon The Great God Brown back in '88, when I was scowering plays in a family bookcase for monologues, having been advised not to rely on any material printed in monologue books. So I was reading my way through a nine play O'Neill anthology, and this mid-period tragedy lept right out at me with its grotesque, sentient masks and heady poetry. And there was the wild artist, Dion Anthony. This character was the closest psychological match to me I'd yet seen, so I pulled one of my first audition pieces from a paragraph of Dion's lines. It was a weird little monologue with Dion ruminating on his family history before he commits to following Brown, and I first did it for Berkeley Rep--only the second time I'd ever auditioned for anything outside of college--bringing along a red mask my sister had lying around. Suffice it to say, I didn't get called back. But GGB stuck in my mind and the monologue in my memory, and I'd go back to it from time to time, discovering more layers to the language and ditching the mask, creating the sinister/brave front and the anguished soul underneath from the language itself. And to my delight, the monologue has earned me some callbacks, in the process.

The Great God Brown, like many of O'Neill's plays, is a monster to mount. It's overloaded with meanings and raw emotions beneath elaborate artifice. The roles, especially the principals--and Dion's is not even the most demanding--for them to be pulled off successfully, require from the cast not only strong dramatic muscles but experienced musicianship and comic timing, too. (In fact, musicianship and comic timing are essential in nearly all of O'Neill's plays, else they would sink like lead, and dull the impact of the drama.) Logistical nightmares abound in the staging of it, too, with the various set changes and heavy prop list. A theatre company looking to mount GGB is like a symphony orchestra looking to tackle Mahler's 5th, a jazz ensemble deciding to tear through the Mingus songbook for a couple of sets or a dance troupe taking on the Rite of Spring. (I suppose the musical theatre equivalent would be Follies.) It's insane, and that is a big part of its appeal. The script stays in your brain and makes you want to solve its infinite, brilliant riddles, but its logistics can make you want to stick it in a drawer and get back to it later.

Which is pretty much what happened with me and the play, while I spent a number of years with a lot of other projects on my plate. Then the possibility of seeing GGB staged in some way reemerged while I was reading in three of the sea plays at Tao House, two years ago. I fell in love with the setting and its architecture. And since GGB deals a lot with architecture, the play made its way back to my attention, and I felt prompted to inquire as to whether or not GGB had been read there recently and was told that it hadn't. I filed that tempting tidbit for future reference, after all, who would mount it?

The answer came about a year later, when I was understudying in the Oakland Public Theatre production of Wendy Belden's lyric Civil War tragedy, Run Perfectly Still. It was finely directed by Artistic Director, Norman Gee, and featured strong performances by the hightly professional cast, which included Elizabether Carter, one of the most brilliant lead actresses in the Bay Area today. And I knew well of OPT's passion for promoting theatre in the East Bay and so saw the company as a good fit for Tao House, an East Bay theatrical institution. So I handed the play
over to Norman to read, and yes, it caught in his brain, too. I told him of Tao House's interest in seeing the play done, and it then became a matter of reconciling respective calendars and hooking the two parties up.

With that presently happening, I look forward to an outstanding performance of The Great God Brown as played by the Oakland Public Theatre at Tao House--a show which I'm confident will stick around in the brains of those in attendance for much time to come, just as it did when I first read the play some fifteen years ago.