![\"Michelle](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1c79aaf2d62eb809e7c923008e32d3a9e8-AnnaChristie.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge in Anna Christie, at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse.
\n Photo: Julieta Cervantes\n <\/p>\n
When the play that would become Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s Anna Christie opened in 1920, it was named not for the woman that would expand to fill its center but for her father. Chris Christopherson (no relation to the singer<\/a>) stumbled onto the stage in Atlantic City after a tumultuous rehearsal process for which O\u2019Neill was largely absent, its director desperately hacking minutes out of the script and slashing the title to simply Chris while he was at it. Whatever happened in Chris, O\u2019Neill wasn\u2019t having it. By the next year he had rewritten the play from the bottom up, refocusing its spotlight on a character who had begun as little more than a prim cipher, carving away at her marble till he revealed a heroine.<\/p>\n Little wonder that Michelle Williams and the director Thomas Kail (of Hamilton, and Williams\u2019s husband since 2020) found themselves drawn to the play, which has been unfairly eclipsed in recent years by more chest-thumping specimens from O\u2019Neill\u2019s menagerie. (New York has taken multiple Long<\/a> Day\u2019s<\/a> Journeys<\/a>, and at least two<\/a> Icemen<\/a> have come and gone since Anna was last in town.) Talking to Vogue<\/a>, Williams described her fixation on roles like Anna Christie\u2019s sharp-mouthed, deep-feeling protagonist: \u201cIt\u2019s a response that is totally inarticulate and flies out of my body and attaches itself to the work like a harpoon. And then, all of a sudden, I\u2019m going in that direction, whether I really want to or not.\u201d O\u2019Neill would approve: His play is, after all, about the sea \u2014 or, more accurately, about the inexorable currents that sweep us up like the undertow, the ecstatic callings we\u2019re powerless to resist despite their danger, despite all our efforts to be good.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a passionate, gripping piece of writing, spilling over with its writer\u2019s flair for big, chewy dialects, suffused with briny fog and contraband booze, and, perhaps most surprisingly, sporadically funny and solidly if subtly feminist. That Kail\u2019s production captures its complex, tactile vitality \u2014 at once plush and grimy; Eugene was no minimalist \u2014 is, whatever the shortcomings, a real triumph. O\u2019Neill is always a heavy lift and, in our era of postmodern super-sophistication, it can also feel like a precarious one: Lines like \u201cDat ole davil, sea \u2026 No man dat live going to beat her, py yingo!\u201d or Anna\u2019s Mae West opener \u2014 \u201cGimme a whiskey \u2013 ginger ale on the side. And don\u2019t be stingy, baby\u201d \u2014 are easy to tip into caricature; but fail to commit to their music and they won\u2019t sing. O\u2019Neill is like opera for actors, requiring performers who can marry feeling and high style, and this Anna Christie\u2019s got them.<\/p>\n At the apex of the play\u2019s central triangle, Williams is as luminous and precise as a Vermeer painting. Wounded and guarded but still hungry for life, she yearns and flickers without ever going moony or soft. At 45, she\u2019s also superb at embodying a 20-year-old\u2019s at once brighter and blurrier shape \u2014 \u00a0the still-forming personhood, the flashes of whimsy and defiance, the overwhelming wanting. Hardly out of her teens, Anna Christopherson is a Swedish immigrant, brought by her mother to Minnesota as a young child while her father, Chris (Brian d\u2019Arcy James, unfurling in the role as if it were written for him), was constantly away at sea. \u201cAy tank it\u2019s better Anna live on farm, den she don\u2019t know dat ole davil, sea, she don\u2019t know fader like me,\u201d says Chris to his barfellows when he learns by letter that the daughter he hasn\u2019t seen for fifteen years is on her way to join him in New York. (These days, like an addict trying to swear off the bottle, he keeps closer to shore, captaining a barge instead of conscripting on ocean voyages.) Superstitious, tipsily well-meaning, and full of ideals that his life hasn\u2019t borne out, Chris is an old hand at self-deprecation as self-defense: He wasn\u2019t good enough for Anna, he insists. He did what was best for her.<\/p>\n But poor Anna. The upbringing Chris left her to was less hearty American dream and more bleak midwestern nightmare. Anna arrives at the Manhattan waterfront with a suitcase full of secrets her father can\u2019t know \u2014\u00a0 we learn them because, in a stroke of brilliance, O\u2019Neill gives her a conversation with another woman, a raggedy waterfront eccentric and erstwhile bedmate to Chris called Marthy Owen. The role only appears in the first of the play\u2019s four acts, but the marvelous Mare Winningham \u2014\u00a0 frowsy and wry with impeccable comic timing \u2014\u00a0 reveals it for the rough-hewn jewel that it is. When Anna and Marthy meet, like recognizes like: A survivor sees another woman who\u2019s weathering the long storm. As Marthy hears Anna out, so do we: At 16 she was raped by one of her cousins, after which she ran away and, struggling to survive alone in St. Paul as a governess, eventually turned to prostitution. \u201cOut there I called myself Anna Christie,\u201d she says with a jaded half-smile. Now, she doesn\u2019t want to be Anna Christie anymore. Not unlike her playwright \u2014 who almost died twice before he was 25<\/a>, eventually emerging from a sanatorium determined to write plays \u2014 she\u2019s been terribly sick and, in the still-churning wake of both illness and experience, has determined to start her life anew. The question, given her gender and the nature of her so-called shame, is will anyone let her?<\/p>\n It\u2019s not impossible to draw lines across the century between O\u2019Neill\u2019s play and now. Its American narrative is fundamentally one of immigration and displacement, and its men undergo violent confrontations with their own identities \u2014 with how much of themselves they\u2019ve hung on rotten notions of masculine potency and feminine purity. Anna Christie long predates our current cultural fluency with \u201ctrauma,\u201d but the play is all about what it means to experience it, to carry it, and, as a woman, to be forced to relive it in the hope \u2014\u00a0 possibly both vain and deadly \u2014\u00a0 that it might get a few men to see things differently.<\/p>\n That stuff\u2019s all right there, both on the page and vibrating in the performances. At the same time, there\u2019s a refreshing lack of attention being drawn to it here. Perhaps it\u2019s a function of letting celebrity alone to do the work of getting butts in seats (across from Williams, an absolutely feral Tom Sturridge plays Anna\u2019s love interest, the Irish ship\u2019s stoker Matt Burke), but whatever it is, it feels like a shift in the winds of our preoccupation with relevancy. There\u2019s not even a director\u2019s note in the program \u2014\u00a0 just a company of artists trusting in the richness and strangeness of the story they\u2019ve undertaken. Watching them forgo protestations of their own necessity, I felt braced, even a little giddy \u2014\u00a0 like Anna standing on the deck of Chris\u2019s barge, her shoulders dropping in the mists of Provincetown harbor: \u201cI love this fog! Honest! \u2026 It makes me feel clean \u2014 out here \u2014 \u2019s if I\u2019d taken a bath.\u201d<\/p>\n Anna\u2019s newfound serenity doesn\u2019t last for long, though. Soon enough, a wild thing emerges out of the fog. Kail has this creature from the sea, the shipwrecked stoker Matt, crawl out from beneath the stacked wooden pallets that form the stage deck, and the entrance is gleefully horror-coded. Sturridge\u2019s hand shoots up from the murk, grasping the air and slapping the planks before his body follows. Like many moments in the play, it\u2019s got a tilted, inarguable humor to it. Through a poetic lens, it\u2019s easy to see Anna and Matt as Shakespeare\u2019s Miranda and Ferdinand, the latter cast up from the sea to fall instantly in love with a woman who seems, to him, goddess-like, whose rough old father fears for her virtue. (D\u2019Arcy James evokes a sodden old Prospero, hardheaded and soft-bellied, devoid of magic but driven on, clumsily, by genuine love.) But the sly joke has two punchlines: Not only do we know the truth of Anna\u2019s past, but Matt is also less the gallant young prince and more Caliban. He\u2019d be horrible in pretty much all ways \u2014 his aggression and swagger and barely contained brutality \u2014 if he weren\u2019t so absurdly earnest. \u201cA big kid,\u201d Anna calls him. Sturridge crows and growls his lines, rolling his torso and crouching to crawl on his knuckles like a young silverback. His Matt has somehow avoided domestication altogether, and so of course Anna\u2019s armor cracks for him \u2014\u00a0she who \u201cnever could stand being caged up nowheres,\u201d who longs so fiercely for escape and autonomy, be they as far-off and hazy as the cloud castles of some fairy tale.<\/p>\n When I wanted more from this Anna Christie, it was in its exploration of the throughline of Anna\u2019s own yearning, especially in the play\u2019s wonderfully tricky conclusion. O\u2019Neill directs the steamroller of tragedy right at the characters and then \u2014 atypically, delightfully \u2014 diverts it. It\u2019s an offbeat, gutsy move, one that\u2019s caused plenty of fuss over the years. Critics at the time called the ending \u201cbogus\u201d and \u201cbanal,\u201d but what it actually does is keep the door open on the essential question of Anna\u2019s freedom. Where is she left, this enduring spirit, at this turning point in her struggle with two men who love her and whom she, too, loves? The truth is that all this love hasn\u2019t yet created a space for her that isn\u2019t a cage. A profound, decisive gesture is missing at the end of Kail\u2019s production \u2014\u00a0 we\u2019re left without an image to emblematize Anna\u2019s arc, to gather up its reverberations and cast them questioningly into the future. But we are still left with Williams\u2019s performance, and that\u2019s more than enough.<\/p>\n Anna Christie is at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse through February 1.<\/p>\n Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n