Anna Christie

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Successful plays of one era tend to date badly as mores, slang and social issues change over time. While Anna Christie won Eugene O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1922, its themes of fallen women and the double standard make it look like a relic of a past time. Both of these themes have been made passé by the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and the perfection of the birth control pill. One way to revive such plays is by inventing a new interpretation or by chemistry in casting. The 1993 Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson had such chemistry that you could feel the electricity across the theater. Unfortunately, Thomas Kail’s production at St. Ann’s Warehouse starring his wife film star Michelle Williams has no such saving grace.

Written first as Chris Christopherson in 1919 prior to Beyond the Horizon, his first Pulitzer Prize winning play, O’Neill revised this three-act comedy into Anna Christie, a four-act melodrama, when the earlier version failed in Philadelphia and did not make it to Broadway. Twenty-year-old Anna, who had been sent to live with cousins in Minnesota at age five when her mother died in Sweden while her seafaring father was away at sea, comes to visit Chris whom she has not seen in 15 years.  Both have wrong impressions of each other from their letters which have not told the truth. Chris has implied he was a janitor on land but in reality has been captain of a coal barge since he gave up the sea. He is under the impression that Anna had a happy life on her cousins’ farm but she has been abused and over worked. Running away at 16, she has worked as a governess but also has a terrible secret.

When Anna (who has shortened her last name to “Christie”) finds Chris drunk at Johnny “the Priest’s” Bar near South Street, in Manhattan, he has been living on his barge with Marthy Owen, his female drinking buddy, whom he unceremoniously kicks off the ship in order to bring Anna on board. Thinking he needs to protect Anna who tells him that she only got out of the hospital two weeks before in St. Paul, he warns her about getting involved with sailors who have a girl in every port and might not return home for a year or two at a time, which had been his own pattern. He also curses the ocean which he refers to time and again as “dat ole davil sea,” the cause of all his problems from which he wants to protect his daughter.

Unfortunately, trouble arrives off the outer harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts, when Chris rescues Mat Burke, an Irish stoker almost drowned when the steamer he worked on sank in a storm. Mat, a brawny bruiser, is immediately smitten with Anna, though Chris does everything in his power to keep them apart. When Mat proposes, Anna turns him down, but not before he forces out of her the secret she has been hiding: she is not the pure woman that Chris and Mat think she is. Seduced by her own cousin at age 16, she had run away to become a hooker in a bordello in St. Paul. She criticizes all men for thinking she was “a piece of furniture” and proclaims that nobody owns her. Products of their time, both men immediately disown her and go off to get drunk but later regret their hasty actions which lead to the ironic denouement.

About twice the age of O’Neill’s heroine, that is not the problem with Williams’ interpretation of the title role. Her actressy performance using a great many awkward hand gestures undermines her Anna. Worse yet is the lack of chemistry between her and Tom Sturridge’s Mat when they should demonstrate love at first sight. Although he throws himself into a very physical performance, he does not connect with the other actors emotionally. Nor does it help that his Irish accent and Brian d’Arcy James’ Swedish accent as Chris (dialogue coaching by Deborah Hecht) are often impenetrable meaning a certain amount of the dialogue is lost. As Chris, James, his face hidden by a thick white beard, seems to let his accent do the heavy lifting as his performance as the sea captain and father seems rather superficial. On the other, in the brief scene in the first act bar, Mare Winningham as Marthy is very impressive as a weary woman of the wharves who knows the way of the world.

Nor is the production helped by its design. Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’ set for each of the four scenes is put together by the four husky actors playing the longshoremen and bartenders while we watch which is not only distracting but pointless. For the opening scene, the actors create Johnny “the Priest’s” from a pile of chairs and tables that at first look like a trash heap. The Act One bar scene has a huge industrial steel bar for the counter which is then lifted high above the playing area and is spun around for each additional scene to little purpose. For Acts Two- Four, the men move pallets around to suggest the barge, changing the angle for each scene, even piling them up in the third act so that Anna can get higher and higher as she is haranguing the men. For all their efforts, there is no atmosphere even when part of the theater is inundated with a fog effect.

The thrust stage which has the audience sitting on three sides ought to bring the action closer but doesn’t as Kail has his actors so far back on the set. The stage is backed by a half wall of bottles which is lit blue or green alternately in Natasha Katz’s lighting design but ends up very distracting as at times it looks like vegetation and at others simply broken bottles. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are too attractive for both the working class longshoremen and bedraggled hookers who have seen better days.

The play has been trimmed of some very minor characters which have often been excised in modern productions. Thomas Kail’s production is a disappointment because of the talent involved in a minor classic rarely revived. His Anna Christie does not prove that this dated play cannot be revived, just that this is not the way to do it. This talky production is never boring but it never gets under your skin or causes gasps the way it should.

Anna Christie (through February 1, 2026)

St. Ann’s Warehouse

Joseph S. & Diane H. Steinberg Theater, 45 Water Street, in DUMBO, Brooklyn

For tickets, visit http://www.stannswarehouse.org

Running time: two hours and 35 minutes including one intermission