Review Roundup: ANNA CHRISTIE Starring Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge

Anna Christie, directed by Tomas Kail and starring Michelle Williams, Tom Sturridge, and Brian d’Arcy James. opened at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.

The production runs through February 1, and also features Mare Winningham, Jordan Barbour, Joe Carroll, Anthony Chatmon II, and Timothy Hughes.

Richard Lawson, The Guardian: 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.

Sara Holdren, Vulture: That stuff’s all right there, both on the page and vibrating in the performances. At the same time, there’s a refreshing lack of attention being drawn to it here. Perhaps it’s 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’s love interest, the Irish ship’s stoker Matt Burke), but whatever it is, it feels like a shift in the winds of our preoccupation with relevancy. There’s not even a director’s note in the program — just a company of artists trusting in the richness and strangeness of the story they’ve undertaken. Watching them forgo protestations of their own necessity, I felt braced, even a little giddy — like Anna standing on the deck of Chris’s barge, her shoulders dropping in the mists of Provincetown harbor: “I love this fog! Honest! … It makes me feel clean — out here — ’s if I’d taken a bath.”

Lane Williamson, Exeunt: It all comes together well, but doesn’t quite turn into something great. It’s a perfectly respectable production, but I’m not convinced the play has much to offer, despite its Pulitzer-winning bonafides. The central trio (and a marvelous one-scene performance from Mare Winnigham) make it worth seeing, but it’s not really the kind of play to generate excitement beyond that. Still, this is clearly a passion project for Kail and Williams and the results of their work are quite impressive.

Matt Windman, amNY: The production ultimately feels less like a fresh interrogation of “Anna Christie” than a respectful showcase for Williams—who is married to Kail—and a museum piece. It honors the play’s legacy, but stops short of making a compelling case for its return.

David Gordon, Theatremania: Kail’s abstract staging offers little sense of time or place, and his designers offer even less specificity. The set, designed by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, is relatively nondescript yet oddly complicated, with a steel girder inexplicably dangling over the actors’ heads and slatted wooden platforms that a quartet of hunky seaman rearrange between scenes (those Tazewell costumes appropriately show off). The thrust stage leads to a surprisingly rookie mistake from a director of Kail’s stature: crucial moments and subtle expressions can be missed depending on where you’re seated, even in the center section where the action is pitched. Composer Nicholas Britell underscores transitions with gloomy cellos and violins, signifying that this is meant to be “serious” theater. At least Natasha Katz’s lighting has something to offer, conjuring the mystical blue-green glow of the sea from a hill of empty beer bottles.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: More problematically, Williams doesn’t bring the necessary intensity to the role of a young, hard-edged prostitute who falls in love with Mat Burke (Tom Sturridge), a shipwrecked Irish stoker who literally emerges from the sea. In her opening scene, when she walks into a waterfront saloon and utters the immortal lines “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side…and don’t be stingy, baby!” she might as well be a teenager ordering an ice cream soda. Although she’s done fine work onstage in Cabaret and Blackbird (she received a Tony Award nomination for the latter), her performance here feels tenuous, lacking the magnetism that would draw us into her character.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: Director Thomas Kail—best known for large-scale Broadway musicals such as Hamilton and the recent Sweeney Todd—doesn’t seem to have a fully formed vision for the production. (Perhaps it’s lost in the fog. Seriously…enough with the dry ice.) What he does have is a wonderful showcase for his wife, Williams, whose stage appearances—dating back to her daring 1999 turn in Tracy Letts’ trailer-trash Texas comedy Killer Joe—are far too infrequent for theater fans’ taste. She might not match O’Neill’s description of Anna (“a…girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion”), but she’s got the grit. Her “nobody owns me” speech to Mat and Chris—“I’ll do what I please and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do!”—is staggeringly good.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Kail and his design team have crafted a handsome production, with sturdy seamen shifting and stacking weathered wooden pallets around the stage between scenes and a giant steel beam first used as a saloon bar and then hoisted aloft to hover over the action like a ship’s mast or a giant sword of Damocles. (Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis are credited with the scenography, with Natasha Katz’s lighting amid the occasional onset of fog by special effects designer Jeremy Chernick.) But the attempts at symbolism seem strained for a play as straightforward and muted as this one — where the characters manage to avoid the ravages of alcoholism or shipwreck or even death by gunshot despite the appearance of a pistol late in the show.

Helen Shaw, New Yorker: Unfortunately, Sturridge gives a counterintuitive performance, one so at odds with the play’s romance and the performances around him that it sinks the ship. O’Neill describes the coal stoker, in one of his many page-filling stage directions, as a “powerful, broad-chested six-footer . . . in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.” The trouble isn’t that Sturridge, who has a quicksilver, elven quality, has been cast against type; it’s that he interprets the bewildered, love-stunned lummox as a pallid, twitchy creep, crawling on his haunches like Caliban and wriggling as if he’s got an eel down his trousers. (The night I saw it, Mat wouldn’t stop fumbling with his pants—Anna, I thought, get out.) Kail emphasizes this odd disjunction by stacking the mostly unspeaking ensemble with bruisers, their rolled sleeves straining over yoked shoulders. They, alongside similarly capable-looking stagehands, haul elements of Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s set around, totin’ platforms and heftin’ tables. Maybe Kail is unconcerned with realism and has asked Sturridge to play Mat’s inner self, the frail and contorting one he keeps hidden. But then what’s with all the stevedores from central casting?

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: With its main characters speaking and acting past each other, this Anna Christie doesn’t convincingly locate a strong rope-line from 1921 to now. Instead, it feels as unmoored as one of its barges, and overall a little lost in the muffling mists of that old devil sea.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: 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.

Matthew Wexler, 1 Minute Critic: Williams hovers on the crest of these shifting social tides with nearly too much expertise, delivering a polish to Anna’s emotional navigation that outshines her father, who blames all of life’s woes on the sea, and a verbally stunted lover-to-be, who brands her a slut when learning of her past.

Average Rating: 51.7%