"Anna Christie"

Why is it that Eugene O'Neill's love letter to the sea, "Anna Christie," is so rarely performed? The standard answer would be that it is a dated play, one of O'Neill's earlier creations about working-class and immigrant culture, featuring clunky dialect, a predictable love story, and portside derelicts who no longer speak to us. Some might say "Anna Christie" is a castaway to the better works that sail the dramatic seas. But that would be fair neither to O'Neill nor the play itself.

In its fall 2011 production of "Anna Christie," London's Donmar Warehouse, which has been called "one of the world's leading producing theatres," revealed the force of this overlooked play. Directed by Tony Award-winner Rob Ashford, the Donmar production demonstrates wonderfully the vitality and relevance of the younger O'Neill.¹

To appreciate the importance of this magnificent staging, it helps to understand the vexed evolution of the play, especially its initial failures. As has been amply described by O'Neill scholars, "Anna Christie" went through several incarnations before appearing as the play we see today.² In the summer of 1918 O'Neill began writing a drama based on an old Swedish sailor called Chris Christophersen, whom he knew from his drinking days in a New York seaport dive called Jimmy-the-Priest's. O'Neill named the play after Christophersen, though it became known by its abbreviated title, Chris.³ Following the success of The Emperor Jones in 1920, O'Neill wanted to continue his innovation in carving out authentic portraits of American culture in a new kind of drama. Given that his one-acts were successful in Greenwich Village, O'Neill now set his sights on Broadway with longer plays. While Emperor broke new ground in featuring an African American lead, "Anna Christie" used working-class and immigrant culture to offer a distinctly American version of "the lower depths."⁴ As O'Neill explained in a letter: "I was trying to do something new and outside of the carpentered flip-flap that constitutes the usual American play."⁵

Tryouts for Chris were to begin in Atlantic City and then move to Philadelphia before landing on Broadway. When the Atlantic City rehearsal of Chris began to struggle, the director implored O'Neill to help clean up the script.⁶ But there was a flu epidemic raging in New York, and O'Neill, already of frail health, had become ill and couldn't travel. Chris opened without O'Neill seeing any final rehearsals, or the opening, and the play received weak reviews.

Often his own worst critic, O'Neill saw several problems with the script and set about correcting them. He believed that the last scene was "all wrong and must be radically rewritten" before the play moved to New York.⁷ He also realized that the focus on Chris as a character was misplaced. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the unwieldy and lengthy Chris was the portrayal of Anna as a dull and respectable British typist, who had proper manners and little depth. Played by British actress Lynn Fontanne, this initial Anna refreshed herself with a cup of tea upon her arrival in New York instead of slinging back a whisky. Far too respectable to be found in an "awful dive," the Anna from Chris Christopherson makes her entrance instead wearing a "blue, tailormade suit." Unlike her counterpart in "Anna Christie," this Anna arrives with a sense of optimism about being a career girl, proclaiming: "I dreamed of the big opportunities for a woman over here in America." She has no reason to turn to the brothel, because as a typist she can make "enough to live on my own and be myself," as she puts it.⁸ Anna is also not dependent on her father, but rather intends to support him. Chris convinces Anna to wait to look for work until after a voyage at sea, and once Anna is on board, she is smitten by the sea and fog. Still, the stakes of a proper British typist at sea and in love with an officer were not what they could be. Like other playwrights before him, O'Neill recognized that prim stenographers make less interesting subjects than their brothel sisters.

Once O'Neill realized that no amount of editing could rescue Chris, the New York engagement was canceled. In a letter to the producer, O'Neill indicated how he would rewrite it: "Suffice it to say that of the present play I would keep without change only the character of Chris—I'd give you a real daughter and lover, flesh-and blood people—and the big underlying idea of the sea."⁹ What emerged was a fully revised version of the play, now called The Ole Davil. Before O'Neill could complete the script, however, his father died, leaving him unable to write for some time.¹⁰ When he returned to work, the play that emerged was called "Anna Christie." The plot centered more on Anna, who changed, as Travis Bogard succinctly puts it, from "typist to trollop."¹¹ In relocating Anna to the American side of the Atlantic and the other side of the underworld, O'Neill used the brothel to authenticate his more compelling character. Consequently, the lead character in "Anna Christie" no longer made insipid remarks like "I'm a full-fledged typist now, Father."¹² O'Neill also modified Anna's love interest, Paul Andersen, so that instead of being a well-mannered officer, he appears as a brash Irish American named Mat Burke. Since O'Neill was working on no fewer than four scripts in 1920, it would take yet another year to get Anna to Broadway, even after the extensive revisions.¹³ "Anna Christie" finally opened in November 1921 and had a respectable Broadway run. Yet, even after winning his second Pulitzer for Anna, it was hardly one of O'Neill's favorite plays, and at times he hated it.

If O'Neill had seen the recent Donmar production, however, he would have realized that his goal of delivering "a real daughter and lover, flesh-and-blood people—and the big underlying idea of the sea" could be magnificently realized. The simple, yet evocative, stage design by Paul Wills suits O'Neill's drama beautifully. The stage is strikingly sparse, with rough-hewn wood on the floor, and a two-story brick back wall fully revealed. It has been painted dark blue, with hints of ocean waves (or are they clouds?) that reach seemingly toward the heavens (a riff on a Titian painting, director Ron Ashford later told me). With a light cast diagonally down from above stage left (gorgeously designed by Howard Harrison), and a hint of fog in the air, the designers created the world of the sea. It's an almost sacred space, a space of contemplation. Something important will happen here, you feel. One feels the lure of the sea, its capacity to make all new, to cleanse. Yet, there is also the sense of peril from the "ole davil sea," conveyed by the dark colors and stark isolation of the empty stage.

What we don't realize is that this seemingly modest stage will move deftly, transforming itself, just as the characters undergo their own metamorphoses. With an innovative score by award-winning Adam Cork, a foghorn becomes musical, woven together with sea gulls, waves, Irish folk music, and ominous chords. With choreographed precision to swift sound and lighting cues, sailors drag in set pieces and assemble "Johnny-the-Priest's" onstage while singing sea-shanty tunes.¹⁴ This quasi-Brechtian beginning not only deconstructs the idea of a realistic set, it also provides the time needed to mark the transition from the calm sea to the "Hell Hole" that O'Neill resuscitates from his drinking days.¹⁵ Four actors (Michael Walters, Matt Wilman, Robert Lonsdale, and Henry Pettigrew) perform multiple roles throughout the performance: as set movers and singers, longshoremen in Johnny-the-Priest's, seamen on Chris's coal barge, the almost-drowned sailors from Mat Burke's capsized boat, and, subtextually, as the brothers on the Minnesota farm who violated the young Anna.

Next, the superb David Hayman appears in the bar as Chris, immediately picking up the energy and pace of the drama (see fig. 1). Hayman is a small, thin actor with dark hair—hardly the thickset Nordic man whom O'Neill describes in the script as "a short, squat, broad-shouldered man of about fifty" with "a thick, drooping, yellow mustache," "a thick neck" and "big, hairy, freckled hands."¹⁶ Yet, despite his different physical appearance, Hayman captured old Chris's "good humor" and "obstinate kindliness," demonstrating power and range. In an interview, director Rob Ashford said he wanted Chris to look like someone who is caving in on himself, as someone whose life has eaten away at him—one who is slighted, worn out, and worn away by his guilt for leaving both Anna and the sea.¹⁷ This worked perfectly. Hayman embodies this symbolic wasting, and yet, in an instant, he can become full of life, with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye as he throws back a few drinks and sings his trademark drunken tune, "My Yosephine."

But it was Anna's entrance that I was waiting for. Played by the astonishing Ruth Wilson, Anna arrives with her back to the audience, wearing a telltale red jacket that signifies her trade in the world's oldest profession, and carrying the iconic suitcase that Pauline Lord lugged in the 1921 original production.¹⁸

Fig. 1.

David Hayman as Chris and Ruth Wilson as Anna in the Donmar Warehouse production of "Anna Christie," 2011. (Photo by Johan Persson)

In both the 1921 staging and the 1930 film version, Anna makes a star entrance, where all focus is directed upstage to the ladies' section of the bar (or, in the case of Greta Garbo in the 1930 film, with a beautifully lit, soft-focus medium shot in the doorway). Ashford's decision to withhold our gaze from Anna is only momentary, for after a slight beat, Ruth Wilson charges into that hellish bar as if she owns the place. This is a waterfront saloon, a hellhole, and when Wilson utters the lines made memorable by Garbo (they were her first spoken lines on celluloid)—"Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. . . . And don't be stingy baby"—she immediately transports us across time and class boundaries.¹⁹ Much of the effect here belongs to O'Neill, whose gritty urban slang makes Anna sound unlike any previous prostitute character on the American stage. Rather than expressing love for or dependence on men, as was common for the courtesan prototype, Anna comes across as independent and strong. Moreover, as played by Wilson, Anna's heartbreaking story offers an unparalleled sympathetic perspective on prostitution. O'Neill had tapped into the zeitgeist of the moment, producing a memorable female character from the underworld. Similarly, Wilson makes Anna speak to our cultural moment, just as the character did ninety years ago.

An actress of tremendous talent and range, Ruth Wilson peels back the many layers of Anna's character, showing us her frailty, anger, and resilience. Wilson calls to mind the young Meryl Streep in her seemingly effortless ability to summon up so much on a small stage. For example, when she says her hooker name, "Anna Christie," Wilson is able to deliver the "quotation marks" that suggest an identity removed from her former self. On more than one occasion, Wilson had the audience (and this reviewer) in tears. A theatergoer sitting next to me likened Wilson's subtle acting style to the way a jazz singer hits a note just under pitch and slides up to it with melancholic intensity.²⁰

Ashford's decision to remove the wall of the ladies' section of the bar, while not historically accurate, provided a fruitful opportunity for the men and the women to interact in this hellhole.²¹ Throughout the first act, the four sailors move around Anna like animals circling prey, showing what it is like for Anna to be constantly leered at, surveilled, bought and paid for. These interactions also demonstrate the other choice Anna could make, should she decide not to take her rest cure on Chris's barge, Ashford tells me. There are ample clients waiting for "Anna Christie" wherever she goes.

The first scene also provides us with a landmark moment in modern theater: it is the most extended and detailed scene between two prostitutes in early American drama.²² In Chris, Anna and Marthy interact little. Indeed, O'Neill did not even write them into the bar at all in his first version, saving their encounter for the coal barge, where they exchange just a few lines. Wisely, O'Neill expanded their scene in "Anna Christie" so that they take up a quarter of act 1. Usually in early twentieth-century dramas in which social issues (such as sexuality or sexual mores) are discussed, it is the men who debate them. In "Anna Christie" by contrast, Anna and Marthy hold forth about "the life," each representing two ends of the world's oldest profession: Anna is a young, albeit worn-out prostitute, while Marthy is an older inebriate dependent on drunks like Chris. As Anna herself recognizes, "You're me 40 years from now. That's you!"²³ Their encounter in the portside dive is a perfect setting for two fallen women to discuss prostitution from their differing perspectives as wizened sea hag and twenty-something prostitute. And yet, few dramatists had deigned to put their female characters in such a space until O'Neill.²⁴

The wonderful Jenny Galloway gives emotional depth to the usually overlooked Marthy. This "drink-soaked mistress of [Chris's] domicile," as one critic of the day called her, is often played for laughs as a clown-like drunk.²⁵ Marie Dressler's filmic portrayal of Marthy featured Dressler's training in vaudeville physical comedy on a number of occasions. By contrast, Galloway's Marthy is the salt of the earth, showing us not only her veneer—as when, for example, she boasts "there's plenty of other guys on other barges waitin' for me"—but also the core of a woman who is all too familiar with Anna's horrific journey.²⁶ Galloway delivers several bittersweet moments, such as when she realizes she will soon be out on the streets, she turns away with silent painful anguish. After her exit, viewers realize how alone Anna is.

Act 2 takes us out to sea. The transition from portside dive to Chris's barge is another astonishing feat of choreography and scenic design. The longshoremen become stagehands again, and, while the musical score surges with intensity, Johnny-the-Priest's bar is disassembled and rearranged, becoming now the windowed top of Chris's barge. The rough planks from the bar become the exterior of the vessel. The stage heaves with the music, pitching forward in front and rising upstage. We are at sea. Given the intimacy of the Donmar space, it is as if we are wedged onto the coal barge itself.

Anna appears from the dimly lit trap below, wearing a white dress under her raincoat, apparently rested and cleansed by the sea (see fig. 2). As Wilson walks about the barge, she playfully interacts with the fog, blowing at it, touching it, and allowing herself to be caressed by it. The way she speaks about being cleansed by the sea, even though O'Neill's dialogue seems especially artificial here, is utterly believable, and the sea and fog at last signify with the magnitude O'Neill imagined. Yet, as every O'Neillian knows from other sea plays, the sea and fog can harm just as they purify, and Anna's happiness cannot last for long.

Fig. 2.

Ruth Wilson as Anna in the Donmar Warehouse production of "Anna Christie," 2011. (Photo by Johan Persson)

Chris's sea-dog ears, ever attuned to the "ole davil sea," hear the storm before it hits. The soundscape, which has been trickling below, soars portentously until—crash!—the stage literally heaves up and down, lightning blitzes, and it begins to rain (yes, rain) on stage. A tempest has been conjured. What tempest, the faithful reader might ask, for there is none in the script? Behind the rain and stage magic is no Prospero, but rather the design team, whose perfect storm foreshadows the tempestuous romance ahead (and makes Mat's narration of his castaway days at sea more meaningful). Chris's sailors haul an impressive length of rope onstage to rescue Mat's shipwrecked group, and one by one their wet bodies are spewed from the sea and slide down the ramp (or birth canal?) to the edge of the barge. It is a spectacular demonstration of theater machinery that Steele MacKaye would admire.²⁷ One by one, the rescued sailors are helped to safety and taken offstage. The stage seethes in the storm with no one on it. This is one of several carefully placed pauses that give the production a pulse. We wait with great anticipation to see what the sea will next offer us.

In one of the more remarkable star entrances I can recall, Jude Law's powerful arm reaches over the side of the barge just as a minor chord punctuates the gesture. First, hand and arm reach over the ship's bow, then another arm, and finally Law drags himself with enormous effort onto the coal barge. Soaked and stripped to the waist, Law is a muscular, brawny Mat Burke, proving my fears of him being miscast entirely false.²⁸ He is what most of the audience has been waiting for, and part of me regrets that he steals the show (it is Anna's play, after all). Yet, Ashford is not so much capitalizing on Law's star power and well-built physique as he is following O'Neill's stage directions: "He is stripped to the waist, has on nothing but a pair of dirty dungaree pants. He is a powerful, broad-chested six-footer, his face handsome in a hard, rough, bold, defiant way. He is about thirty, in the full power of heavy-muscled, immense strength."²⁹ Law embodies this heavy-muscled man with incredible intensity and, to my surprise, charm.

Law's approach is intensely physical in this demanding role, with his passion and agony seeming to be written upon his body. Moving about stage with a mixture of egoism and vulnerability, sure on his feet one minute and on the brink of collapse the next, Law's Mat Burke is multifaceted. He is a man of primal instincts: part Hairy Ape, part Eben Cabot (see fig. 3). He is also a man of action. As played by Law, Mat hardly stops moving, whether he is pulling himself along the barge with the ropes, grabbing Anna, or throwing around set pieces like they were matchsticks. Until he realizes Anna is Chris's daughter, he manhandles her as he would grab a portside whore, not at all deterred by Anna's swift slaps.

Fig. 3.

Ruth Wilson as Anna and Jenny Galloway as Martha in the Donmar Warehouse production of "Anna Christie," 2011. (Photo by Johan Persson)

Later in the scene, when Law's Michelangelo-chiseled body collapses in Anna's lap, it becomes clear why Ashford cannot resist evoking the Pietà. The sacredness of that iconic moment is accompanied by sexual tension. Anna's hands rest on Mat's heaving, seemingly unconscious body in a poignant beat that begs the question of what will follow. Salvation from an unlikely sailor? Doom at sea? Incredible sex? Perhaps, finally, love? Anna seems to ponder them all before Mat comes to (see fig. 4).

Once Mat believes she is a "dacent woman," he drops his churlish demeanor, "disremembers" his whoring days, and affects what might be called courting a lady. Law repeatedly touches the crucifix around his neck, making its significance in the final act believable. As Mat and Anna speak about being cleansed by the sea, both leaning on the rope—a kind of umbilical cord to the recuperative sea—a flicker of hope emerges. Until I saw Law's performance, I had never understood why Anna would love a man like Mat. What was in it for her to love such an abusive brute? Law's nuanced interpretation of Mat shows us why Anna would take a chance on love, on this remarkable creature whom Poseidon himself seemed to offer for her salvation.

Fig. 4.

Jude Law as Mat and Ruth Wilson as Anna in the Donmar Warehouse production of "Anna Christie," 2011. (Photo by Johan Persson)

Just as act 2 conjures an unexpected storm, so act 3 delivers an unscripted bed. The stage lowers and flattens out, the foghorn sounds, the rope is cleared away, and we are inside Chris's docked barge. Outside, the dock hovers a story above, and a staircase leads below to where Anna rocks in a chair next to the bed. As Ashford explained, the bed is essential in a play about prostitution because it is an emblem of the trade. He places it virtually center stage. My immediate reaction was that this is exactly where it should not be, for the scene is supposed to take place in a cramped coal barge. But as the act unfolds the choice seems perfect. The bed, like the sea, is both symbolic and useful. As Mat learns of Anna's former life, he lifts, smashes, and throws the bed about the room. When he later threatens to kill her, we know he could do so with his bare hands. Yet, tellingly, Mat and Anna have few moments on the bed—its emptiness is significant. The bed is more a dumping ground or a site of violence, as when Mat wrestles with Chris and tosses the old Swede onto the bed like a bag of laundry. In this moment, as in the ending, the men seem to have more intimacy than Mat and Anna, at least until the bittersweet kiss before Anna says goodbye.

The climax of this act—and, indeed, the play—proves why "Anna Christie" is a great play, and particularly a great feminist play. Few female characters in the American dramatic canon thus far have stood their ground, or demonstrated independence and sense of self, as Anna does. As both men ponder Mat's future with Anna, they begin fighting over her as if she were a possession. Mat tells Chris, "She'll do what I say! You've had your hold on her long enough. It's my turn now." Upon hearing their squabble, Anna retorts with fiery independence: "You was going on's if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?—'cepting myself."³⁰ In one of the more moving monologues in American drama, Anna at last reveals how she was abandoned by old Chris, abused and raped by her Minnesota relatives, and used by men like Mat ever since. The effect of the speech is heart-wrenching. In the 1921 production one critic recounted: "an electric thrill passed through the audience. It was like an echo of Nora in A Doll's House—this cry that she, who had sold herself many times, at least would not be 'owned' by any man."³¹ Indeed, there is an important comparison, a dramaturgical trajectory, to be made between Nora and Anna—all the more reason for this play to be welcomed back into the dramatic canon. When Ruth Wilson delivered this speech, a similar electric thrill passed through the audience and it was as if she tapped into a well of anguish; few dry eyes remained in the audience. So, too, Law and Hayman show how they are "destroyed entirely," as Mat puts it, making their plights tragic as well. The men storm off to drink away their sorrows, and a much-needed interval breaks the tension. Which brings us to the problematic fourth act.

While many of O'Neill's plays have been controversial for various reasons, "Anna Christie" has one of his more misunderstood—or perhaps unrealized—endings, at least until the Donmar production. Although the majority of reviews from the original production called "Anna Christie" a success, most also agreed that the last act was "full of bogus things." As the reviewer for the Dial put it, the end of act 3 "is where good plays end. This one goes on to a so-called happy conclusion." Another review likewise criticized "that wretched and illogical last act," claiming that it "was quite unworthy of O'Neill and sounded as though it had been evolved in a Broadway manager's office."³² Robert Benchley mused, "The author would have done well to put that fourth act in an open boat with food and water for three days and turn it out into the sea off Provincetown before sending the play into New York." Maida Castellun wrote that O'Neill nearly missed writing a great play, having butchered the ending: "Such an ending to such a beginning is tragic beyond expression. It is worse than a blunder. It is a crime against artistic truth as well as against life." Indeed, the last act seemed so dispensable that when the script was reprinted in Theatre Magazine in 1922, the editors simply summarized the final act in a paragraph.³³ As the performance history of "Anna Christie" suggests, the play encountered success, running 177 performances at the Vanderbilt Theatre.³⁴ Nevertheless, O'Neill considered "Anna Christie" one of his failures and resisted the publisher's efforts to include it in a collection of his plays. In particular, O'Neill felt that New York audiences misunderstood his last act. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, he attempted to correct these impressions:

In the last few minutes of "Anna Christie," I tried to show the dramatic gathering of new forces out of the old. I wanted to have the audience leave with a deep feeling of life flowing on, of the past which is never the past—but always the birth of the future—of a problem solved for the moment but by the very nature of its solution involving a new problem.³⁵

O'Neill intended the ending as a "comma" in the sentence, with more drama—more problems—waiting in the second clause, after the curtain comes down.³⁶

In spite of O'Neill's intentions, the final act nonetheless remains often derided as a happy ending.³⁷ Previous to viewing the Donmar production, I have sided with critics who fault O'Neill for wrapping things up too conveniently with the convention of marriage. What the extraordinary Donmar production taught me is that the ending required the right performances and direction to make sense.

So, how had Donmar delivered O'Neill's goods? First, as I have already described above, the love story between Mat and Anna seemed utterly believable with the right performers. Second, the Donmar production focused not merely on Anna's redemption, but rather on both Mat's and Anna's salvation. The scene in which Mat asks Anna to swear a "terrible, fearful oath" that she loves only him has always struck me as one-sided.³⁸ It seems unfair to ask her to swear an oath when he has done his own share of whoring. However, as staged by Ashford, the oath takes place with both Anna and Mat kneeling side by side, holding the crucifix together. Ashford explained that he wanted to show both of them putting themselves on the line. The curse from the oath could strike a blow as easily to Mat if he were unfaithful.

Finally, and most important, the concluding moments of the play achieved the ambiguity—the "comma"—that O'Neill desired. Instead of raising their glasses to toast a happy ending as the script calls for, in Ashford's interpretation Anna begins to move up the staircase and finally ascends to the upper realm, leaving the men below. In choreographed symmetry, the men move away from her. Her final lines, "Aw say, what's the matter? Cut out the gloom. We're all fixed now, ain't we, me and you?" are spoken like a detached chant from her perch above.³⁹ The word "fixed" takes on a new meaning here, for there will be no toast to what lies ahead. A special spot comes up on Anna, who leans back in a standing Pietà, bathing in the sea's redemption.⁴⁰ Literally cut off from the men (for the staircase has been removed), she accepts her fate alone and realizes she doesn't need them. Her final pose holds our attention as a powerful image of redemption and self-acceptance. Meanwhile, the four other actors join Mat and Chris to form a kind of male sea chorus, suggesting the perils that await them, scanning their eyes across the horizon while singing a final mournful tune. In such a setting, Chris's "Fog, fog, fog all bloody time" has particular resonance. It is one of the most haunting final tableaus I have ever seen.⁴¹

I left the Donmar wanting more. Returning a second night, and chatting with patrons, I kept hearing that they come to Donmar because of its quality. "We come because it's the Donmar," as one patron told me. I could see what he meant. Was I smitten by the sea? A period piece? A cutting-edge production? All of the above, I think.