Dion Anthony

O'Neill introduces his protagonist, Dion Anthony, as "lean and wiry, without repose, continually in restless nervous movement." When he first appears at the dock, Dion's face is masked. The mask is a "fixed forcing of his own face dark, spiritual, poetic, passionately supersensitive, helplessly unprotected in its childlike, religious faith in life into the expression of a mocking, reckless, defiant, gaily scoffing and sensual young Pan." The audience discovers later that Dion began wearing the mask after his friend Billy Brown betrayed him. He explains that from that moment he became "silent for life and designed a mask of the Bad Boy Pan in which to live and rebel against that other boy's God and protect myself from His cruelty." Throughout the play his insecurities tear at him and cause him to hide behind a mask of cruel indifference. At one point he asks himself a series...