Scott Klavan: Anna Christie

Anna Christie

St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY

Reviewed by Scott Klavan

Jan. 17, 2026

Anna Christie, by Eugene O’Neill, now being revived on stage with film/TV star Michelle Williams in the title role at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, was first produced on Broadway in 1921and became well known as the vehicle for Greta Garbo’s first talking film role, 1930. The current production, directed by Thomas Kail, is atmospheric and affecting, with some finely passionate acting in the supporting parts. But Williams’s lead work is inadequate, pinched and withdrawn, better suited to camera than stage. After this reviewer watched Garbo’s triumphant work in the older film, the actresses’ turns evoked thoughts about the contrast between stage and film, the evolution of cultural preferences and abilities, and memory.

Pauline Lord as Anna Christie in 1921

Anna Christie, originally developed by O’Neill with The Provincetown Players and then performed on Broadway in 1921, starring once-admired-now forgotten Pauline Lord, was a popular play for its young playwright, winning him the Pulitzer Prize. (Other Broadway revivals include 1977, directed by Jose Quintero, starring Liv Ullmann, and 1993, a hot hit show at the time, with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson.)

Its story tells of troubled Anna Christie arriving on the Provincetown, MA, waterfront to meet her estranged father Chris Christoferson, a hard-drinking veteran sailor now working as the captain of a barge, for the first time in fifteen years. Anna, brought up by cousins in St. Paul after her mother’s death, has a mysterious, unsavory past, which she keeps to herself, only cryptically mentioning her recent release from a hospital, presumably after having had an abortion. Chris, mostly away at sea during Anna’s childhood, is thrilled to see his long-lost daughter; he takes her to live with him on the barge. As he mistrusts, even hates, the “Devil Sea” for how many men it has carried away, the many women it has widowed, Anna feels the roiling water and its fog as a strangely cleansing palliative. When lusty Irish sailor Matt Burke washes up onto the barge after his boat sinks, Anna is drawn to him, and Chris grows increasingly protective and jealous. The three form a tormented love triangle, and Anna finally reveals her true past of abuse by her cousins and later work as a prostitute; the relationships explode, tearing apart before finally being tenuously patched back together.

Kail, known for Hamilton & In The Heights, directs the actors in an hypnotically flowing style of movement, reflecting the watery seaside locale, with the dockside saloon Chris habitually frequents, and the rocking barge, created by actors rhythmically constructing and de-constructing piles of wooden battens, and a long cylinder flown in and out of the playing area. The opening sequence at the saloon featuring Chris (Brian d’Arcy James) drinking with his barfly lover Marthy (Mare Winningham), waiting for the arrival of daughter Anna, is clear, earthy, and believable. The production of the play—originally written in four acts, here performed in two—has many moments of a piercing sincerity, and the early 20^th- century period details and behavior, elements often ignored or purposely thrown out by other modern stage revivals of classics, here is met straight-on, much to the credit of the thoughtful, courageous director and design team.

But when Williams arrives as Anna, and the story escalates in conflict, illustrating the themes of the desperate actions and beliefs/devotions/superstitions the characters employ to fight the “fog” of the “devil sea,” the uncontrollable and unpredictable forces of life outside ourselves, the passions within us, her modest interpretation and physical expression hinders the show’s rise to its needed heights. The undeniably gifted Williams, so poignant in films such as Brokeback Mountain, Manchester By the Sea, TV’s Fosse/Verdon, on stage displays a kind of recessive energy and vocal quality that makes only a small impression; while we wait for Anna’s eruption at the pain men’s lust and life’s corruption have caused her, her admission of her morally checkered experiences, it never comes.

Williams has performed several times on New York stages, including as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and it doesn’t seem to be a movie star arrogance that keeps her from tapping into the depths of the character. Rather, it may be the opposite, an inhibited hesitance to “go there,” to get down and dirty, as Anna does in the later sections, and a reliance on a calculated period delivery and attitude, rather than getting under the words to the heart, as it were. This cover-up takes the place of openly feeling and expressing the pain and humiliation Anna carries with her, and her huge fear/rage at being forced to finally reveal her degradation to the men in her life. The performance gets swallowed up by the requirements of the story and character.

This lack wouldn’t be so apparent if the other actors didn’t fulfill their obligations with such brio and skill. Mare Winningham does great in the smallish but colorful part of Marthy, and Brian d’Arcy James handles Chris’s Swedish accent and conflicted emotions with the exuberance and confidence that marks the many stage performances, in comedy, drama, and musicals, he has given for the past twenty five years. Tom Sturridge, the British actor seen in NYC in the one-acts SeaWall/A Life, with Jake Gyllenhaal, is fantastic as Matt, funny, frightening and touching; his coldly savage fight with Chris is a highlight, and his scene towards the end wherein he makes Anna swear on a cross to always love him, only to distrust it when he realizes she isn’t a Catholic, is the deepest, best moment of the night. (His entrance in the last section after Matt has been in a fight is eerily reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bloodied arrival at the Dallas police station in November, 1963.)  Maybe most admirable, Sturridge handles the O’Neill language in such a way as to bring out the naturalism and beauty inherent in dialogue that, on the page, can seem clichéd. 

It is that tension between old and new-fashioned, the challenge of presenting a one- hundred-year-old play in a modern politicized, technological world, with wrenching actions and naked emotions that contemporary audiences and arts groups tend to minimize or reject, that led me to watch for the first time the Greta Garbo film of Anna Christie, to see how it holds up and compares to the St. Ann’s show.

Blanche Sweet in 1915

For the record, Anna Christie was first made as a silent film, in 1923, shortly after the play’s Broadway run, starring once-revered-now forgotten Blanche Sweet. Interestingly, while Garbo made the 1930 movie, directed by Clarence Brown, said to be her favorite director with whom she eventually made seven films, she was simultaneously shooting a German-language version, with a separate cast and director.

The American film of Anna Christie is one of the best Pre-Code pictures, photographed and performed with a grimly adult, convincing sensibility. Charles Bickford, the once-respected-now-forgotten character actor—perhaps remembered only by Baby Boomers for The Virginian‘60s TV western—is brutally honest as Matt, bitter and powerful. The screen adaptation by Frances Marion, the once-pioneering-now-forgotten female writer of dozens if not hundreds of early sound films, twice winning the Academy Award, is concise and authentic, featuring several added-on opened-up sequences, in particular, Anna and Matt’s on-shore date at Coney Island, including a roller-coaster ride, illuminating their romantic relationship, kept somewhat muffled in the play. (The amusement park section features the amazing scene—apparently based on a real park attraction—where Matt throws a baseball at targets, which hit, knock two young women wearing only flimsy lingerie out of beds onto the floor.) At Coney, Marion adds an extra scene for Marie Dressler, the once beloved-top-box-office-star-now forgotten, giving a brazenly comic, moving performance as Marthy. 

Greta Garbo as Anna Christie

When Garbo appears at the saloon, her past is apparent in her face and bearing, in her tatty hat and dress, and Marthy immediately picks up on her life as a streetwalker. The camera subtly shows the holes in Garbo’s sweater, the opposite of Michelle Williams’s perky stylish outfit in the play. Garbo’s performance as Anna may be one step behind the naturalism of later actors, but it is so lived-in, varied and, in its own way, true, changing from a lost saloon soul at the opening to a woman daring to start to love a man again with Matt, to the tortured confession of her sexually-battered, ruined youth, that she rises above any knocks for old-school playing. The movie—which also stars the similarly, effectively broad and vulnerable Charles Marion as Chris—is a terse and haunting  90-minute classic.

The current stage show and the old movie of Anna Christie separately contain, share, and swap artistic remnants, concepts and practices, some in an inchoate, newborn state then, fully formed today, others prevalent then, existing in ghostly outlines, or forgotten now. Here are some of them:

—amplified sound—the ’30 film, its famous advertisement “Garbo Talks!” taking precedence then in the public mind over the O’Neill play, was made in sound’s early days, and the mic’ed voices come off as rough and harsh. Bickford shouts virtually all his lines, possibly a manifestation of theater training that affected many actors of the period making the transition to film; but it makes sense for the hardy role of Matt. The contrast with Garbo’s low husky voice, which became her trademark, works for the clash of the lovers’ personalities in the movie. Whether purposeful or accidental, the grating quality of the sound mixes with the story’s rough-hewn, pitiless setting and interaction; it is a fortuitous combo of theater and screen. Today, at St. Ann’s, the production, like almost all major shows in NYC, is itself heavily mic’ed. Only here, the pattern is inverted: film actors can have their voices jacked up for theater. For the most part, at St. Ann’s, this is unobtrusive, but one wonders whether Williams’s lack of projection, unlike the other performers, is caused by reliance on film breathing, as it were, with a goal of quiet intimacy, instead of the traditional “full body breathing”, open-lunged sound supported by the legs and butt, akin to singing, that stage actors have employed since the beginning of performance. The idea being that the breath, body, and emotion, work together to produce a “big” voice and expression capable of reaching the back row. The use of mics in plays has gone on for years, but frankly, stage acting technique still doesn’t know how to adapt to it, or even really use it. Ultimately, it seems to work best for actors to just revert to historical broad uses of breath and voice, simply made louder by microphones, the artistry being in finding naturalism in “unnatural” activity. But excellent film actors such as Williams, trained the opposite way, or simply worried about over-playing, often flounder looking for the proper method of vocal support and projection.

—Feminism- O’Neill’s play, written in an early period of female emancipation in the ‘20s, is up-front about Anna’s resentment towards the brutality and entitlement of men. “I hate men!” Anna states forthrightly and, during her admission of her libidinous past, she yells: “Nobody owns me. Except myself!” And: “I’m my own boss. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” Here, the men fight back, suffer and rage in loneliness and yearn equally with Anna for love, providing a full, heartbreaking Battle of the Sexes. This openness about sex and male-female relations was allowed in the Pre-Code era, before it was sanitized by the restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, beginning in roughly 1934. Today, we seem to have another, unwritten Code, especially when it comes to the depiction of men and women, especially in theater. Basically, women characters in many new works sound off with dissatisfaction about men, all of their complaints are accepted as truth, and men say nothing or weakly acquiesce, or are not even allowed on stage in the play; it’s a one-way battle, a competition with one competitor, diluting or completely avoiding provocation, controversy, conflict, and drama, the core of theater.

—Tennessee Williams/Eugene O’Neill—Tennessee Williams was both an admirer and kind of rival of O’Neill and as I viewed the play and film of Anna Christie, it was striking to see in them many seeds of A Streetcar Named Desire. Anna, like Blanche, is a woman with an immoral past posing as an upstanding woman, only to have her secrets painfully revealed. Matt essentially plays the role of both Stanley and Mitch, the boorish sex animal as well as the working stiff searching for a last chance at love and connection. Bar-hound Marthy’s speeches seem a precursor to T. Williams’s later parade of alcoholic wastrels, most notably Confessional, a gritty one-act that evolved into the full-length Small Craft Warnings.

—St. Ann’s Warehouse itself—the famed arts group often focusing on the avant-garde, has used several different locations and buildings in NYC for its 45-year history. For the past ten years it has performed in a large former 1860 tobacco warehouse in the DUMBO neighborhood under the Brooklyn Bridge. The handsome flexible space has presented shows from The Wooster Group; transfers from Europe such as all-female Shakespeare plays, some featuring Harriet Walter; the controversial Oklahoma! revival directed by Daniel Fish; shows with Lou Reed and Mark Rylance. The brick-walled theater, using a three-quarter stage for Anna Christie, brings the past palpably into the present, and St. Ann’s reputation for compelling, off-beat and stimulating productions, continues.

Finally, it is the disparity between past and present artists’ willingness, or even ability, to accept within yourself, or use your imagination to feel, and then have the technique to express, certain profound, if painful,universal human feelings in public, rather than running from them or pretending you’re above or “over” them, that captures this critic after seeing the play and film of O’Neill’s famous piece. By these feelings, I include among others: moral confusion and shame, the bitter suffering of self-hatred, a prideless desperate need for love, all at the center of Anna Christie. I ask myself: Self, why does it seem that actors (and writers) from an earlier day and time were more willing and able to get into these seminal feelings, and express them creatively? Some of the answer may have to do with the older artists’ hardscrabble backgrounds: Greta Garbo escaped European poverty by having several affairs and relationships with older men who guided and funded her rise as a Hollywood star; Charles Bickford reportedly was tried and acquitted at the age of nine for shooting a motorman who ran over his dog; worked as a lumberjack then stoker in the Navy and served in World War I; Marie Dressler permanently ran away from home at age 14 to join a theater troupe, and spent years criss-crossing the country in tours, good and bad; Frances Marion dropped out of school at 12, then attended an art institute that burned down in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; Eugene O’Neill, the son of an alcoholic father and morphine-addicted mother, went to sea, returned, and suffering from depression, attempted suicide, then developed tuberculosis. Perhaps the personal toughness and resilience of these artists transferred over to the honesty and unafraid genuineness of their work. But even contemporary artists from comfortable affluent suburbs and maybe, prestigious grad schools, have their own travails, failures and miseries; everyone does, at every time. So why don’t we see the deep feelings caused by these struggles as often as we should, in the way we need, in the art itself? The theater revival of Anna Christie does offer us a partial return to the efforts of the past. But let’s hope that the earlier ways, exemplified by the Garbo film, which still live inside us, teach and inform us, whether we admit to them or not, don’t drift out into the fog of the sea, beyond our understanding, and grasp.

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott has performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, and in regional theater, and numerous shows Off Broadway, including five roles in two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays, Applause Books. For twenty years, Scott was the personal Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, Warner Bros., and Viacom. He was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the New York International Fringe Festival. He directed a pilot production of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in a feature in The New York Times. He also directed the follow-up pilot, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Sr. Scott helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. Scott is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he twice won the Paul Newman Acting Trophy, and a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works. He taught Creative Writing for Johns Hopkins University Young Scholars, a nationwide program for exceptional students, and for ten years, was a Group Leader in the field of Drama Therapy, for organizations including Creative Alternatives of New York (CANY), and Counseling in Schools (CIS), working with teens and adults with emotional disabilities, from underprivileged backgrounds. In addition, Scott currently works independently developing and editing plays and other written material, and teaches older adults at the JCCManhattan and other arts organizations.