Anna Christie Off-Broadway Reviews

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

In Thomas Kail’s luminous and mesmerizing revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama “Anna Christie,” which opened on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge play the tumultuous lovers. Her lonesome Anna is amused by Mat and happy to let him adore her; his peacocking Mat is a terror yet given to disarming gestures, like fantasizing about their blissful picket-fence future just minutes after they meet (she looking New England chic in an oilskin coat; costumes are by Paul Tazewell).

Without the help of stronger production elements to deepen Anna’s story, the scenic design can only go so far, as the plot about a struggle for redemption by men is a struggle to invest in. In 2025, a woman conforming to societal expectations and suffering shame for sex work feels discouraging, partly because we’re still living in a world where women lack liberation.

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.

Williams’ shift from prostrate grief to helpless amusement hints at hidden dimensions of a character who will always be a couple of steps ahead of the men trying to control her. But O’Neill was indeed truthful about the ending. Winningham’s Marthy doesn’t have to appear to hover as a specter of Anna’s unglamorous future.