Though it won a Pulitzer prize in 1922, Eugene O’Neill’s social melodrama Anna Christie is not among the venerated playwright’s most famous works. For the better part of a century, ambitious theater artists have endeavored to climb the mountains of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. Less so for Anna Christie, a strange piece about a supposedly ruined woman trying to get her life back in order.
It’s an interesting choice of vehicle for star Michelle Williams, making her return to the stage after a nine-year hiatus. Anna Christie is an erratic and now quite dated play, one whose moral outlook is hard to parse, its shifts in tone sudden and varied. There’s also the matter that at 45, Williams is about a quarter-century older than O’Neill’s heroine, who is meant to be a hardened and battered young woman trying to start her adult life on new footing.
But Williams and her husband, the director Thomas Kail, have decided to tackle the play anyway, in a new production at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. (Apt for the play’s nautical theme, St Ann’s sits right alongside a busy waterway.) One hopes that at least Williams and Kail got what they wanted out of the experience, because the audience is served very little of substance in this tedious and mercurial staging.
Broadway legend Bryan d’Arcy James plays Chris, the salty captain of a barge that hauls up and down the eastern seaboard. He used to go on more far-flung maritime adventures, but he has become fearful of the briny deep. So fearful, in fact, that he sent his only daughter far into the interior of the country, to frigid Minnesota, to be raised by family. Now, 15 years later, Anna has ventured east to find her father, fleeing a past that involved brutal work at a brothel.
Anna is furious at men, perhaps particularly her father for abandoning her. But she needs his help, too, and the two eventually form a wary bond – Chris convinced that Anna is a woman of pure virtue, far from the scum and scallywags he is forced to associate with. When just such a rogue, a steamship stoker named Mat (Tom Sturridge), comes sniffing around attempting to woo Anna, tensions begin to mount.
Though, there’s really not much tension at all in Kail’s lurching, lumbering production. Unless you count the stress of watching d’Arcy James, Williams and Sturridge wrestling to gain control of unwieldy accents. Chris, who is Swedish, sounds Irish. Mat, who is Irish, sounds Mancunian. And Anna … well, poor Anna zigs and zags from flat-voweled Minnesotan to faint Brooklynese to what could maybe only be described as WC Fields.
But those are minor technical matters. The real problem of this Anna Christie is its failure to make any of this gendered, conservative strife feel urgent, or really worthy of our time. The case for remounting this curious play is never convincingly made. Williams is obviously the star attraction, but in all her tearful fluster and gathered mettle, she can’t get a handle on the role. It’s an unfortunate bit of miscasting that leaves the production struggling to find its center of gravity.
Sturridge overeggs Mat’s prowling allure and menace, making a lot of big acting-class choices that don’t legibly translate as human. D’Arcy James is more relaxed in his role, but his nuance is too easily subsumed by Williams and Sturridge’s histrionics.
Kail tries many things to make this mess of performance feel like a dynamic piece of art. Actors (rather needlessly) rearrange sets between scenes, overlong transitions that are scored by original compositions from Nicholas Britell (who, among other things, wrote the theme to Succession). There are some trust falls, a fog machine is frequently employed (as fog is a heavy motif in O’Neill’s text), a great metal beam spins ominously over the proceedings. But it’s all adornment of a sinking ship, a production that seems to have no concrete or compelling stance on what forces have sent these people crashing into one another.
There’s a miserablism to Anna Christie that might partly be inherent to the play, bleak as O’Neill’s view of these working-class folks is. Kail, though, adds some squalor of his own, a terribly abiding sense that these downtrodden characters are mere experiments for the actors, that all of this was done as a test of capability rather than being driven by a thoughtful and complex motivation to reinterpret a tricky text. All the very talented people involved would probably get a decent grade for this scene study in theater school, but it’s not a vessel fit for paying customers.
