FOUR DAY RUN FOR HDC PLAY STARTS TODAY

Eugene O'Neill's "The Great God Brown," presented by the Harvard Dramatic Club, will open at Sanders Theatre tonight and run through Saturday. The play honors the seventy-fifth anniversary of the late Professor George Pierce Baker, who founded H. D. C. and trained O'Neill.

At the time of Baker's death, O'Neill said of his former professor that he taught his students "to write plays of life as one saw and felt it, instead of concocting the conventional theatrical drivel of the time." "G.P." (as his students called him) taught at Harvard from 1888 until the offer of heading the new Department of Drama at Yale attracted him to New Haven in 1924.

During his period as professor of Playwrighting at Harvard he established the famous "47 Workshop," which produced such American greats as Philip Barry, the late Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman, George Abbott, and, top of the crop, O'Neill. To produce the plays of these and his other students, "G.P." founded the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1908.

The One O'Neill Likes Best

"The Great God Brown," written in 1925, was the first of pupil O'Neill's so-called psychological plays. It contrasts the dull but successful businessman with the brilliant, erratic artist. To help develop his characters, the playwright has them wear masks when they say conventional things, and take them off when they reveal their real thoughts.

The year it was produced, Barrett Clark wrote: "This play, as far as conception is concerned, is the most subtly beautiful work O'Neill has ever written." And, in a letter to Professor Packard, who was assistant stage manager in the original production, O'Neill himself said: "It is very near and dear to me--(I'm not sure it isn't the best beloved of them all)."