Michelle Williams Hits Every High Note in Anna Christie

When the play that becomes the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie opened in 1920, it was named not after the woman who expanded to fill its center, but after her father. Kris Kristofferson (no relation to singer) stumbled upon the scene in Atlantic City after a hectic rehearsal in which O'Neal was barely present and the director was frantically taking minutes from the script and shortening the title to a simple Chris while he was there. Whatever happens in ChrisO'Neill didn't like it. By the next year, he had rewritten the play from the bottom up, again focusing on the character, who began as a simple cipher, carving out her marble until he revealed the heroine.

It's no surprise that Michelle Williams and director Thomas Kail (of Hamilton, and husband Williams since 2020) found themselves captivated by a play that has been unfairly overshadowed in recent years by even more stunning examples from O'Neill's menagerie. (New York took a few Long Day JourneyWithand at least two Icemen have come and gone since Anna was last in town.) Talking to FashionWilliams described her fixation on roles such as Anna Christiea sharp and deeply feeling protagonist: “It's a completely inarticulate answer that flies out of my body and attaches itself to the work like a harpoon. And then, suddenly, I'm going in that direction, whether I want it or not.” O'Neill would have approved: his play is, after all, about the sea – or, more precisely, about the inexorable currents that sweep us away like the tide, about ecstatic callings that we are powerless to resist, despite their danger, despite our best efforts to be good.

It's a passionate, engrossing piece of work, imbued with a writer's flair for big, chewy dialect, drenched in salt fog and bootleg booze, and, perhaps most surprisingly, sporadically funny and solid, if slightly feminist. This production by Cale reflects her complex, tactile vitality—at once chic and dirty; Evgeniy was not a minimalist – despite all the shortcomings, he was a real triumph. O'Neill is always a heavy load, and in our era of postmodern hyper-complexity, he can also seem precarious: lines like “That old one crushed, the sea… No man alive can beat her, pi-yinggo!” or Anne’s introduction to Mae West—“Give me some whiskey—ginger ale to boot. And don’t be stingy, baby” is easily turned into a caricature; but don't devote yourself to your music and they won't sing. O'Neill is like opera for actors, requiring performers who can combine feeling and high style. Anna Christiethey are.

At the apex of the play's central triangle, Williams is as vivid and precise as a Vermeer painting. Wounded and guarded, but still thirsty for life, she yearns and shimmers, never becoming lunar or soft. At 45, she also perfectly embodies the simultaneously brighter and fuzzier form of a 20-year-old girl – a still-forming personality, flashes of whimsy and defiance, an overwhelming wanting. Barely out of her teens, Anna Kristofferson is a Swedish immigrant brought to Minnesota by her mother as a child while her father Chris (Brian d'Arcy James, playing the role as if it was written for him) was constantly at sea. “Yes, Anna would be better off living on a farm, then she doesn’t know that old man Devil, the sea, she doesn’t know a father like me,” Chris says to his bar mates when he learns in a letter that the daughter he hasn’t seen for fifteen years is coming to join him in New York. (These days, like a drug addict trying to give up the bottle, he sticks close to shore, commanding a barge instead of being drafted on sea voyages.) Superstitious, tipsy with the best of intentions, and full of ideals that his life has not borne out, Chris is an expert at self-deprecation in self-defense: he wasn't good enough for Anna, he claims. He did what was best for her.

But poor Anna. The upbringing Chris left her was less the heartfelt American dream and more of a darker Midwestern nightmare. Anna arrives on the Manhattan boardwalk with a suitcase full of secrets her father can't know—we learn them because, in a brilliant move, O'Neal gives her a conversation with another woman, a ragged boardwalk eccentric and Chris's former bedmate named Marty Owen. The role only appears in the first of the play's four acts, but the wonderful Mare Winningham – scruffy and wry, with impeccable comic timing – reveals her as the rugged gem that she is. When Anna and Marty meet, like learns like: a survivor sees another woman weathering a long storm. As Marty listens to Anna, so do we: At 16, she was raped by one of her cousins, after which she ran away and, struggling to survive alone in St. Paul as a governess, eventually turned to prostitution. “There I called myself Anna Christie,” she says with a weary half-smile. Now she doesn't want to be Anna Christie anymore. Unlike his playwright – who nearly died twice before he turned 25Having finally left the sanatorium with the intention of writing plays, she was terribly ill and, despite still ongoing illnesses and worries, decided to start her life anew. The question is, given her gender and the nature of her so-called shame, will anyone let her?

It is impossible to draw a line between O'Neill's play and today, a century later. Its American history is fundamentally one of immigration and displacement, and its men are subjected to a brutal confrontation with their own identity—with how deeply they hold themselves up to rotten notions of male potency and female purity. Anna Christie long before our current cultural grasp of “trauma,” but the entire play is about what it means to live it, to bear it, and, as a woman, to be forced to relive it in the hope—perhaps futile and deadly—that it might make a few men see things differently.

All this is present, both on the page and vibrating during performances. At the same time, there is a refreshing lack of attention to this issue. Perhaps this is a function of letting celebrities do the butt-kicking work alone (opposite Williams, the absolutely wild Tom Sturridge plays Anna's love interest, Irish fireman Matt Burke), but whatever it is, it feels like a change in the wind of our preoccupation with relevance. There is not even a director's note in the program – just a group of artists who believed in the richness and unusualness of the planned story. Watching them abandon their claims of their own necessity made me feel energized, even a little giddy—like Anna standing on the deck of Chris's barge, her shoulders sinking into the fog of Provincetown Harbor: “I love this fog! Honestly!… It makes me feel clean—here—like I've taken a bath.”

However, Anna's newfound calm does not last long. Soon a wild creature emerges from the fog. Cale makes this sea creature, shipwrecked stoker Matt, crawl out from under the stacked wooden pallets that form the stage deck, and the entrance is gleefully horror-coded. Sturridge's hand shoots out of the darkness, grabbing the air and slapping the boards before his body follows. As with many aspects of the play, there is an evasive, undeniable humor. Through a poetic lens, Anna and Matt are easily seen as Shakespeare's Miranda and Ferdinand, the latter cast out of the sea only to instantly fall in love with a woman who seems to him like a goddess, whose gruff old father fears for her virtue. (D'Arcy James resembles sodden old Prospero, stubborn and soft-bellied, devoid of magic but clumsily driven by genuine love.) But there are two punchlines to this clever joke: Not only do we know the truth about Anne's past, but Matt is also less a gallant young prince than Caliban. He would be terrifying in almost every way – with his aggression, swagger and barely contained cruelty – if he weren't so absurdly serious. “Big baby,” Anna calls him. Sturridge crows and growls, turning his body over and crouching to crawl on his knuckles like a young silverback. His Matt has somehow escaped taming altogether, and so of course Anna's armor will crack before him – the one who “could never stand being locked up in nowhere,” who so fiercely yearns for escape and autonomy, be they as distant and hazy as the cloud castles of some fairy tale.

When I wanted more of it Anna Christieit was an exploration of the depth of Anna's own longings, especially in the play's surprisingly complex ending. O'Neill directs a steamroller of tragedy directly at the characters, and then – atypically and delightfully – distracts it. This is an unusual and bold move that has generated a lot of buzz over the years. Critics at the time called the ending “phony” and “trite,” but it actually leaves open the key question of Anna's freedom. Where was she, this persistent spirit, at this turning point of her struggle with two men who love her and whom she loves too? The truth is that all this love has yet to create a place for her other than a cage. There is no deep, decisive gesture at the end of Cale's production—we have no image to symbolize Anna's arc, to gather its echoes and throw them questioningly into the future. But we're still left with Williams' performance, and that's more than enough.

Anna Christie is in stock at St. Anne's until February 1st.