Iteration is the dramatist’s most elementary instrument; pet expressions make for character metadata. “Gosh-golly, Julie…” reminds us that Julie is Julie and the speaker’s a dork. Within the performs of Eugene O’Neill, verbal tics accumulate so thickly it verges on self-parody. Take The Iceman Cometh, wherein the creator signposts the need of delusions, or “pipe goals,” about 40 butt-numbing instances. Spoon-feeding motif is one factor, however that is snaking a tube down the viewers’s throat. In his earlier and cruder Anna Christie from 1921, O’Neill makes use of the ocean as an all-purpose metaphor for all times’s ups and downs, and he by no means lets us neglect it. Swedish barge captain Chris Christopherson is eternally harping on “dat ole Davil sea,” like a Dickens gargoyle stamped along with his catchphrase. In the meantime, Irish stoker Mat Burke’s blarney is awful with “divil” this and “divil” that. Seafarers are hella superstitious? Acquired it, Gene.
Possibly O’Neill’s idioms acquired on my nerves as a result of there’s little in director Thomas Kail’s staging to distract from them. Apparently, the nice playwright’s property is strict about trimming textual content or easing up on ethnic accents, each of which might make an overwritten semi-melodrama comparable to Anna Christie extra palatable (regardless that the play is within the public area). So St. Ann’s Warehouse is residence to a slavish rendition of a chunk that, a century-plus on, exhibits its age. Her deck creaks, her hull leaks. This stage curio that final set sail in the course of the Clinton period stalls outdoors the bay.
Its opera-thin story: The aforesaid Chris (Brian d’Arcy James), a boozy but ethical coot, welcomes residence his wearied, cautious 20-year-old daughter, Anna (Michelle Williams). Fifteen years in the past, he banished the woman to family in Minnesota. Chris didn’t need Anna rising up among the many whores and seadogs of the New York waterfront. Irony of ironies: Anna, missing steering and safety, was nonetheless dragged down. Raped by a cousin, she finally turned a intercourse employee in St. Paul and fled to New York after her brothel was raided. The revelation of Anna’s scarlet previous comes out after she has fallen for the tough and roaring Irish coal shoveler Mat Burke (Tom Sturridge), a liaison her father deplores. Over 4 acts, the play charts Anna’s progress from bedraggled waif to self-piloting girl. Chris and Mat’s emotional thickness renders them almost clownish in contrast, however a vibrant rapport among the many actors might give O’Neill’s “completely happy” ending a glimmer of hard-won hope.
Whereas I’ve admired these proficient leads individually prior to now, they make a shaky threesome, unable to occupy the identical world. James comes off as too clean-cut, hale and earnest for the oafish Chris, and he’s hemmed in by the Swedish accent and the aforesaid repetitions. Like a youthful, British John Malkovich, Sturridge typically embraces a unusual bodily and vocal method. His Mat’s all squirmy disjointed limbs, lolling head and lifeless eyes, droning in a porridge-thick “Oyrish” accent extra Caledonian than Hibernian and often unintelligible. Loping about like a surly marionette with snipped strings, Sturridge appears an unappetizing match for Anna, who has endured years of males treating her “like a chunk of furnishings.” There’s one thing damaged and pitiable within the stunted, fearfully Catholic Mat, however not sufficient dignity.
That leaves Williams, whose Anna begins abject and traumatized however finally ends up dominating the opposite two, a multitasking daughter-mother-lover. Initially, costume designer Paul Tazewell drapes the gamine actor in a lacy collar, skirt and copper-hued bucket hat when she exhibits up at Chris’s favourite dive bar, an East Coast antecedent of Blanche DuBois trying femme and frazzled. Anna subsequently graduates to sensible pants and extra gender-neutral couture and blossoms in a wise blue gown and crimson sweater, reclining on a block earlier than last blackout trying just like the mermaid that Mat first errors her for. In truth, Anna is a mermaid however in reverse: She beckons sailors to a greater life, not watery demise.
Sturdy visuals might mitigate a few of the lack of actor chemistry, however Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s modular set of wood pallets—frequently moved about and reconfigured by the forged like Lincoln Logs—grows tiresome. A greenish hedge alongside the upstage wall could possibly be grass or vegetation however seems to be a whole bunch of liquor bottles artfully jumbled atop one another. Allusions to booze appear redundant right here. Kail levels the play with the viewers in three-quarters. Sightlines don’t get off to a promising begin within the first act, set in a bar, with lengthy stretches throughout which we stare at backs. The scenography opens up later, garnished with the requisite fog and self-conscious manipulation of pallets, comparable to when Anna climbs to the next and better platform from which to declare independence.
Though twice Anna’s age, Williams vibrates with bruised innocence and grit beneath a porcelain veneer. As anybody who streamed Fosse/Verdon or caught her on Broadway in Blackbird 9 years in the past is aware of, the ardent performer has a knack for nervy girls on the verge, simply barely preserving it collectively. All the identical, to make Anna Christie actually sing, the tortured lovers want animal magnetism: intercourse enchantment, they used to name it. I by no means noticed the 1993 Broadway revival, however to evaluate by photographs, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson had the products. That beautiful pair met by way of the Roundabout manufacturing, left their companions and acquired hitched a 12 months later. In Brooklyn, the showmance already occurred: Williams and her director, Kail, are married, with youngsters, and stay not removed from St. Ann’s in DUMBO. I sincerely hope that their subsequent household affair takes place on a extra seaworthy vessel.
Anna Christie | 2 hrs., 30 minutes. with one intermission | St. Ann’s Warehouse | 45 Water Avenue, Brooklyn | 718-254-8779 | Click on right here for tickets
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