Michelle Williams portrays a former prostitute in a play that was so bold when Eugene O’Neill wrote it that critics objected on moral grounds when it won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it is now so dated that her scandalous past is couched in vague euphemism. “I didn’t go wrong all at one jump,” the title character says, before confiding she eventually got into “a house.”
It is hard to deny the creaky aura that hangs over “Anna Christie,” which is probably still best known for the play’s adaptation as silent screen star Greta Garbo’s first “talking picture” (“Garbo Talks” was the now legendary marketing slogan) – and that movie was released a full decade after the stage debut. But director Thomas Kail smartly leans into the expressionism from that same era in his production of “Anna Christie,” opening today at St. Ann’s Warehouse; the results are a bracingly muscular stagecraft that helps create electrifying moments. If the acting is uneven, sometimes even indecipherable because of the characters heavy Swedish and Irish accents, the actors are always watchable.
Brian d’Arcy James is a stand-out in the cast, nearly unrecognizable in a bushy white beard, who portrays Chris Christopherson, a Swedish-born sailor and habitual drinker. Fifteen years earlier, a sudden widower, he left his five-year-old daughter Anna with cousins on a farm in Minnesota while he sailed the seas. Now settled more or less in New York, the captain of a coal barge, Chris receives a letter from Anna at the waterfront saloon where he hangs out, telling him she will be visiting. Excited, he apologetically informs his girlfriend Marthy Owen (Marie Winningham, another nearly unrecognizable standout) that she will have to move out of the coal barge to make room for his daughter.
Anna arrives at the bar, uttering the line that Garbo made famous, but just sounds antique when Michelle Williams says it: “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” The aim with that line is to establish immediately that Anna Christopherson, who renamed herself Anna Christie, is not the innocent that her father thinks her to be. Right afterwards, it is to Marthy, who happens to be at the bar when Anna arrives, that she confides her actual past: Misused and abused by her cousins on the farm, she escaped to St. Paul, and eventually joined “a house,” which led to her recent arrest and imprisonment; and then, because “I never could stand being caged up nowheres,” her hospitalization. Recently released, she hopes that her father will, in effect, rescue her, giving her a place to rest.
He is happy to do so.
Then one night, a slimed-up Tom Sturridge slithers onto the stage, looking more like a creature from the black lagoon than a shipwrecked seafarer. This is our introduction to Mat Burke, a stoker on a coal barge, who falls in love with Anna, and she with him, much to her father’s dismay. She dares not tell either of them about her past — until she feels forced to.
Sturridge cleans up, but his performance never completely tones down. He is a semaphore of vulgarity, wiping his nose, touching his crotch. This is not the way others have portrayed this character, I’m not sure how plausible it is: Why would Anna fall for somebody who seems to behave no better than the men who exploited her.
If Sturridge overplays her role, Michelle Williams occasionally underplays hers, as if too used to the camera doing some of the work. Still, I found both riveting.
This is in some measure because of what is happening around them — the fog, the atmospheric lighting and sound designed respectively by Natasha Katz and Nevin Steinberg, and especially the cast members who feel like part of the scenery. A more accurate and literally constructive way of putting this is to say that the ensemble makes the setting come to life. Underneath a heavy rusted-color beam slowly spinning, mid-air, they move the furniture and wooden platforms between the scenes, and sometimes within them, to construct and reconstruct the environment. They sometimes function as a kind of furniture themselves, the principal cast members flipping onto them and disappearing into the dark (this, self-evidently the work of Steven Hoggett, credited with “movement.”) These brawny exertions in and of themselves palpably color our perception of the rough life on the waterfront and at sea.
The stagecraft has caused some technical problems that are hard to ignore. The performance I attended was delayed by about 15 minute because, as director Kail explained to the audience in the lobby, they were working to fix the sound system. During the first preview, the beer bottles on a shelf kept on crashing to the floor; they rebuilt the shelf. But whatever the glitches, the effort is worth it: The set is so innovative that it’s not even called a set, but scenography, the latest work by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, the award-winning design team behind “The Outsiders,” who individually have long impressive track records.
By 1941, O’Neill dismissed “Anna Christie” as “the stalest of all my plays.” But playwrights are not necessarily reliable critics of their own work, and critics can’t necessarily predict how individual theatergoers will respond. Chris disapproves of Mat because he doesn’t want Anna near anything connected to the “old devil sea,” because his seafaring father and two brothers all died at sea; it was the reason why he chose to abandon her to relatives on a farm, believing anything would be better than sharing his life at sea . Anna too has her own deep-seated hatred, against all men, because of those who abused and exploited her. Their conflicts with each other and their struggles with their own past, the unmasking of the hypocrisy, the possibility the play presents of redemption – any of these could resonate with theatergoers who aren’t put off by the parts of this century-old play that haven’t aged well.
Anna Christie
St. Ann’s Warehouse through February 1, 2026
Running time: two and a half hours, including intermission
Tickets: $99 – $199
Written by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Thomas Kail
Movement by Steven Hoggett, scenography by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, costume design by Paul Tazewell, lighting design by Natasha Katz, sound design by Nevin Steinberg, special effects design by Jeremy Chernick, hair and makeup design by Nicole Bridgeford, props supervisor Lauren Page Russell, dialect coach Deborah Hecht, original music by Nichola Britell
Cast: Michelle Williams as Anna Christopherson, Tom Sturridge as Mat Burke, Brian d’Arcy James as Chris Christopherson, Mare Winningham as Marthy Owen, Jordan Barbour, Joe Carroll, Anthony Chatmon II, Timothy Hughes, and Noah Plomgren
Photographs by Julieta Cervantes
