With the passage of 80 years since Eugene O'Neill wrote "The Great God Brown," it's tempting to quip that he was trying too hard.

The convention of using masks in the play to show that a character was projecting a false facade, plays today like an antique stage gimmick. The audience "gets it" immediately and shortly becomes restive for something new and different.

At that point, it's useful to step back a bit to understand that when O'Neill wrote the play in 1926, it was something new and different.

So while the Army Community Theatre reading plays like a lesson in theater history, we should also recognize that no non-academic theater in Honolulu is likely to ever stage the play. Audiences simply would not accept four acts, plus prologue and epilogue, and emotionally formal dialogue.

Best known for introducing realism to the American stage and for weighty and pessimistic dramas featuring disenfranchised characters like "The Iceman Cometh," "Desire Under the Elms," and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," the current reading would not be considered typical of his work.

So let's give ACT some points for taking on a show that wouldn't be commercially popular and for cutting its playing time to about an hour and 45 minutes with intermission.

Cecelia Fordham and Richard Goodman trade off as narrators, with Richard Pellett in the title role. Pellett neatly portrays Billy Brown in all his incarnations: the eager-to-please and inexperienced youngster, the unrequited lover, the successful businessman who earns himself the "Great God" epithet, and the grasping opportunist who falls into madness after appropriating the mask of his life-long rival.

Gerald Altweis also does well as Dion Anthony, the promising alpha male who wins the girl, but loses himself in debauchery to cover his insecurity.

The women's roles are less complex, with Karen Valasek reading Margaret — the woman both men love — and Jo Pruden as Cybel — the woman Brown buys for both men's use.

We get the gist of the play from the reading, which uses the face masks required by the original production. But managing the masks, in addition to the scripts, and playing multiple characters often distracts the actors from their basic chore of delivering the dialogue.

Several of the lines are inaudible and facial expressions are often obscured.

And while cutting the script thankfully reduces its playing time, it accelerates Brown's madness — rushing him to the brink without sufficient preparation.

Also, much of the emotion in the final scenes is diluted when their powerful imagery is described rather than portrayed.

But despite shortcomings, the reading offers us some insight into this early O'Neill work — even though it can't provide the full picture.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater performances in Hawai'i since 1973.