O'Neill's The Great God Brown is a truly dreadful play, on paper at least. I'd certainly pay to watch it though, just to see how someone might manage to get the thing on stage. There's all this weird stuff with masks and one main character imitating another behind one such mask (or maybe more; it's tricky keeping count) that would really test anyone's acting chops. How did they ever stage it originally without the audience chuckling throughout? And the dialogue in places (many places) is so sensationally bad it enters a new dimension. It's not so much over the top as out there in the stratosphere, floating beyond human ken.
At one particularly fruity moment I thought I recognised one of the lines, something about God being glue, but since I knew I'd never read the play before I just dismissed this as an odd coincidence. Then late last night I happened to pick up Dardis's book The Thirsty Muse, which I've mentioned here before when ranting about Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night, just to see if Dardis had anything specific to say about particular plays in his excellent and extremely enlightening account of O'Neill's alcoholism. He does, absolutely slamming The Great God Brown as an example of O'Neill losing all artistic control due to his drinking (which was phenomenal, believe me). And the offending line was there. It must have stuck in my memory somehow.
Not that any of this has put me off the world's least talented great writer. Because he is great, as I joyfully discovered when teaching Long Day's Journey Into Night and going on to read The Iceman Cometh and Moon For The Misbegotten in that first great surge of discovery. Now I'm lining up Mourning Becomes Electra since Dardis rates the three plays very highly as part of O'Neill's wonderful final dry period.
Reading of how O'Neill held it together in those final terrible years can only fill one with wonder at his grim triumph, if the experience of Long Day's Journey wasn't wonder enough already.
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