By JOHN ANDERSON

O’Neill has ventured everything in his new play, “The Great God Brown,” at the Greenwich Village, and has achieved a superb failure.

He has poured into it more than the stage can hold.  His imagination has soared on wax wings too near the sun of dramatic illusion and, though he comes tumbling from the skies, it is a brilliant and thrilling fall, since he has dared greater heights than any other.

For here is one play that is tow dramas about all the people in the world.  There is a drama of people as they pretend to be and as they really are.  It is a conflict of humanity, masked and unmasked, of shifting values, of hidden identities, of shy, frightened souls lurking behind the frozen faces of desperate pretense.

To capture these dual implications O’Neill boldly uses masks.  They are not the stylized masks of custom, but careful duplicates of the faces of those who wear them, as individual as their own features but stiff with the rigidity of deathly life.

These grim mummies are put on and off throughout the play, changing its aspect when they are changed.  A whole scene is transformed as a character slips out, his face naked and unashamed, to startle those about him with the sudden terror of reality.

Yet the mechanics of all this are not grotesque.  It is a convention easy enough to accept in principle, and difficult only when the playwright carries it to an extreme of baffling complication by allowing one character to steal the mask of another he has killed.

As long as the personalities had demountable rims, so to speak, it was reasonable and exciting.  But when they became as interchangeable as spare tire the whole play waded out beyond its depth as a stage drama and drowned magnificently in the seething theories of the playwright.

Without a huge diagram indicating when the masks are on and when they are off the story of the action can result only in serious misrepresentation.  Yet this must be risked for the sake of even superficial discussion.

There are a woman and tow men who love her one an artist hiding a sensitive spirit behind a mask of reckless cynicism, and the other, unmasked until the middle of the play, a figure of successful worship, the eternal Babbitt.  There is another woman, a prostitute when masked, but actually the earth mother.

The artist dies and his mask is worn by the other man, who achieves by proxy the love of the woman the artist had married.  And when this identity grows upon him he kills himself, flees from his own murder with the face of another, and is ultimately killed.

Thus there are four deaths.  The physical death of the artist and the survival of his personality.  The death of the Babbitt personality and the survival of the physical Babbitt.  Then the physical death of the Babbitt and the death of the artist personality.

Here the action is so swift and the changing values of identity so quickened that it is difficult to follow the turnings of the scheme.  It seems utterly mad unless we are to suppose that the two men do not represent individual entities but merely different phases of the same person, the Jekyll and Hyde of one man, each with its mask.

This confusion destroys most of the dramatic effectiveness of the latter half of the play, yet leaves its power of absorption unslackened and undiminished.  It goes terrifically on, long after the more theatrical qualities of it have perished.

For O’Neill has written his play with singing ecstasy and a blazing unity of vision which burns most of the obstacles in his way.  They would have daunted a less daring poet.  Single-eyed, he aims straight, and misses only in the inevitable diffusion of the theatre.

He has managed the play structure with amazing virtuosity.  Each line in the dialogue is definitely characterized, each change of incident and mask copied in the nuances of the writing.  It is fluid, sensitized, delicate in detail and rising at time to lyrical loveliness.

Somehow Mr. (Robert Edmond) Jones has managed to cast its spell completely upon the players, and they act it with high inspiration and an almost religious fervor.  It is no slight task to make bodily gesture carry meaning while the face, the key to all emotion, is hidden and rigid.  These actors do that and account for every shading in the script.

Mr. (Edward) Harrigan revealed peculiar insight into this problem of masked acting, broadening his gestures to compensate for the loss of facial play and achieving thereby a consistent and complete effect.

Mr. (Robert) Keith scored most heavily when unhindered by the mask, since his gesturing was weaker, but gave in these flashes of portrayals a fine and vivid impression of the character.

They were splendidly aided by Miss (Leona) Hogarth, as Margaret, the wife, and Miss (Anne) Shoemaker as Cybel, the earth woman, both of whom were adroitly cast and continuously effective.

To the casual majority of playgoers “The Great God Brown” means nothing at all.  To the others it is the highest challenge the theatre, at the moment, has to offer.