Michelle Williams Hits Every High Note in Anna Christie
7 / 10
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.”
