Iteration is the dramatist’s most basic tool; pet expressions make for character metadata. “Gosh-golly, Julie…” reminds us that Julie is Julie and the speaker’s a dork. In the plays of Eugene O’Neill, verbal tics accumulate so thickly it verges on self-parody. Take The Iceman Cometh, in which the author signposts the necessity of delusions, or “pipe dreams,” about 40 butt-numbing times. Spoon-feeding motif is one thing, but this is snaking a tube down the audience’s throat. In his earlier and cruder Anna Christie from 1921, O’Neill uses the sea as an all-purpose metaphor for life’s ups and downs, and he never lets us forget it. Swedish barge captain Chris Christopherson is forever harping on “dat ole Davil sea,” like a Dickens gargoyle stamped with his catchphrase. Meanwhile, Irish stoker Mat Burke’s blarney is lousy with “divil” this and “divil” that. Seafarers are hella superstitious? Got it, Gene.
Maybe O’Neill’s idioms got on my nerves because there’s little in director Thomas Kail’s staging to distract from them. Apparently, the great playwright’s estate is strict about trimming text or easing up on ethnic accents, both of which would make an overwritten semi-melodrama such as Anna Christie more palatable (even though the play is in the public domain). So St. Ann’s Warehouse is home to a slavish rendition of a piece that, a century-plus on, shows its age. Her deck creaks, her hull leaks. This stage curio that last set sail during the Clinton era stalls outside the bay.
Its opera-thin story: The aforesaid Chris (Brian d’Arcy James), a boozy yet moral coot, welcomes home his wearied, wary 20-year-old daughter, Anna (Michelle Williams). Fifteen years ago, he banished the girl to relatives in Minnesota. Chris didn’t want Anna growing up among the whores and seadogs of the New York waterfront. Irony of ironies: Anna, lacking guidance and protection, was nonetheless dragged down. Raped by a cousin, she eventually became a sex worker in St. Paul and fled to New York after her brothel was raided. The revelation of Anna’s scarlet past comes out after she has fallen for the rough and roaring Irish coal shoveler Mat Burke (Tom Sturridge), a liaison her father deplores. Over four acts, the play charts Anna’s growth from bedraggled waif to self-piloting woman. Chris and Mat’s emotional thickness renders them nearly clownish by contrast, but a vibrant rapport among the actors could give O’Neill’s “happy” ending a glimmer of hard-won hope.
While I’ve admired these talented leads separately in the past, they make a shaky threesome, unable to occupy the same world. James comes off as too clean-cut, hale and earnest for the oafish Chris, and he’s hemmed in by the Swedish accent and the aforesaid repetitions. Like a younger, British John Malkovich, Sturridge often embraces a quirky physical and vocal approach. His Mat’s all squirmy disjointed limbs, lolling head and dead eyes, droning in a porridge-thick “Oyrish” accent more Caledonian than Hibernian and frequently unintelligible. Loping about like a surly marionette with snipped strings, Sturridge seems an unappetizing match for Anna, who has endured years of men treating her “like a piece of furniture.” There’s something broken and pitiable in the stunted, fearfully Catholic Mat, but not enough dignity.
That leaves Williams, whose Anna begins abject and traumatized but ends up dominating the other two, a multitasking daughter-mother-lover. Initially, costume designer Paul Tazewell drapes the gamine actor in a lacy collar, skirt and copper-hued bucket hat when she shows up at Chris’s favorite dive bar, an East Coast antecedent of Blanche DuBois looking femme and frazzled. Anna subsequently graduates to practical pants and more gender-neutral couture and blossoms in a sensible blue dress and crimson sweater, reclining on a block before final blackout looking like the mermaid that Mat first mistakes her for. In fact, Anna is a mermaid but in reverse: She beckons sailors to a better life, not watery death.
Strong visuals could mitigate some of the lack of actor chemistry, but Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s modular set of wooden pallets—continually moved about and reconfigured by the cast like Lincoln Logs—grows tiresome. A greenish hedge along the upstage wall could be grass or vegetation but turns out to be hundreds of liquor bottles artfully jumbled atop each other. Allusions to booze seem redundant here. Kail stages the play with the audience in three-quarters. Sightlines don’t get off to a promising start in the first act, set in a bar, with long stretches during which we stare at backs. The scenography opens up later, garnished with the requisite fog and self-conscious manipulation of pallets, such as when Anna climbs to a higher and higher platform from which to declare independence.
Although twice Anna’s age, Williams vibrates with bruised innocence and grit beneath a porcelain veneer. As anyone who streamed Fosse/Verdon or caught her on Broadway in Blackbird nine years ago knows, the ardent performer has a knack for nervy women on the verge, just barely keeping it together. All the same, to make Anna Christie truly sing, the tortured lovers need animal magnetism: sex appeal, they used to call it. I never saw the 1993 Broadway revival, but to judge by photos, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson had the goods. That gorgeous pair met through the Roundabout production, left their partners and got hitched a year later. In Brooklyn, the showmance already happened: Williams and her director, Kail, are married, with children, and live not far from St. Ann’s in DUMBO. I sincerely hope that their next family affair takes place on a more seaworthy vessel.
Anna Christie | 2 hrs., 30 mins. with one intermission | St. Ann’s Warehouse | 45
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