The sea, in the plays of Eugene O’Neill, is never neutral: It is fate, peril, self-delusion, rebirth, truth. How fitting, then, that it is on a New York waterfront that I meet Michelle Williams, the star of a new production of Anna Christie that begins performances November 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (opening night is December 11). We’re in a vast photo studio overlooking the Gowanus Canal, a place of coarse beauty and a setting that uncannily echoes the play’s watery, shrouded world: a rotgut saloon along the East River and a coal barge anchored in harbors in Provincetown and Boston—liminal spaces of fog, tides, grit.
Williams settles onto a sofa—poised, sincere, thoughtful—as barges, silos, and cranes loom through the enormous studio windows. One of the most versatile and acclaimed actresses working today, she has built her career inhabiting complicated yet indomitable women, and she chooses her roles by instinct. “It’s a response that is totally inarticulate and flies out of my body and attaches itself to the work like a harpoon,” she says. “And then, all of a sudden, I’m going in that direction, whether I really want to or not.” Lately, that pull has been toward Anna Christie—an underappreciated, slyly funny, stealthily feminist work by America’s greatest (and most tortured) playwright, which premiered on Broadway over a century ago. “The play has been scratching at the back door for a few years,” she says.
Williams and her husband, the director Thomas Kail—her collaborator on the series Fosse/Verdon—had been looking for a project to take on together (while staying mindful of the demands of raising young kids—the couple has three together). Theater appealed to Williams, who last appeared onstage in 2016 in Blackbird, earning her a Tony nomination, and she and Kail had long admired the adventurous spirit of the productions at St. Ann’s Warehouse—conveniently not far from their Brooklyn home. Anna Christie felt especially urgent to Williams. At a moment when women’s autonomy is under renewed pressure, the play was less of a choice and more of a calling.
Anna is a remarkable heroine: pragmatic, blunt, witty, and unapologetically herself, demanding to be seen and understood on her own terms. As a girl in Minnesota, after the death of her mother, she was abandoned by her father, a Swedish seaman named Chris Christopherson. Anna has been raised by relatives on a farm, endured abuse, and survived as a prostitute, facts O’Neill discloses gradually over the course of the play. At its start, she has come to New York, where her father is stationed, seeking reconciliation and also a sense of safety and home. When she falls in love with Mat Burke, an Irish stoker with a poetic soul—and an extremely combustible temper—their romance falters as illusions collapse under the weight of her past. Neither her father nor Burke can fully accept the reality of Anna’s life; their love for her is genuine, but their fixed ideas of womanhood collide with her clear-eyed realism.
Williams notes that when Anna Christie first appeared on Broadway in 1921, the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, had been ratified only a year earlier. The play, which won O’Neill the second of his four Pulitzer Prizes, remains underperformed—“It has not become canonical in the way that O’Neill’s other work has,” Williams points out, curiously so. The play does contain some traces of melodrama, but it’s a strikingly modern work in its thematic weight and feminist core. Nonetheless, it has inspired several landmark revivals: a 1977 Broadway production starring Liv Ullmann opposite John Lithgow and a well-regarded 1993 Roundabout revival with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson.
It’s precisely that history that appeals to Kail, who typically works on new material, not revivals. “This is something about the theater that I love so deeply,” he says. “To do something that was done over a hundred years ago, you stand in line with all the folks who came before us. And I find that very meaningful.”
Also in the cast are Broadway veteran Brian d’Arcy James as Christopherson and Tom Sturridge—most recently seen in the series The Sandman—as Burke. Kail, whose many Broadway credits include Hamilton, In the Heights, and the recent revival of Sweeney Todd, first met James “through the Hamilton part of our lives,” as he puts it. (James originated the role of King George III; his performance at the Public Theater was a showstopper.) Of James, Kail says, “What Brian brings is such a profound depth of feeling. You believe that Chris loves Anna when Brian says he loves her.”
“He has such a distinct view of what he wants to do for himself and for Anna,” James says of his character, “and of course that is completely shattered by her own complexity and humanness, which he has to accept, or try to accept.” James recently returned from a trip to Sweden, where he studied the cadences of the language in order to master O’Neill’s dialogue, rendered in a peculiar phonetic Swedish patois—just one of the many challenges O’Neill set for actors in this play.
Sturridge is preparing with similar intensity. We meet in the airy lobby at St. Ann’s, a former tobacco warehouse on the East River, on a sunny early-autumn morning. Sturridge, who lives in London, is here shooting a film in the weeks before Anna Christie opens. He’s been reading an O’Neill biography and a collection of the playwright’s letters. He pulls both books from his bag. “I’ve just been looking for a clue as to what he was thinking, what his intentions were—or whether it’s useful to disregard them entirely,” he says. “Sometimes you’ll find a letter to a lover where he leaves a line about Mat Burke or Anna, and it can open up a pathway of investigation.”
Kail first saw Sturridge onstage in Orphans in 2013, a performance for which Sturridge was nominated for a Tony (another nomination came for Sea Wall/A Life, his 2019 two-hander with Jake Gyllenhaal). “There’s a deep sense of self and soulfulness that I’ve found in my getting to know him,” Kail says of Sturridge. “He talks about the characters in this play with this fierce intelligence—their relationships, and how he wants to explore them.”
O’Neill, the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, is a painfully intimate writer, revealing human life for what it is: tangled, dangerous, and deep; his scenes are long and demand unsparing emotional exposure. But actors love to play his characters because they’re so charged with complexity, so riddled with self-contradictions and blind spots. “It’s my favorite kind of theater as an audience member,” Sturridge says. “You feel as if you shouldn’t be allowed to watch what’s going on because it’s so honest. They should be having this conversation on their own. I should not be here.”
And then there’s O’Neill’s language, which can be both naturalistic and highly stylized. With Anna Christie there are long stretches of rhythmically tricky dialogue. Sturridge admits that he finds his character’s speech—lyrical, grandiose, endlessly self-justifying—so knotty that “to get it into me, I’ve got to start working on it very early.” After our conversation, he’s heading off to practice his lines; full rehearsals with the cast won’t begin for another month.
Williams feels the challenge too, though O’Neill shapes her role in an entirely different register. “The language for me had this incredibly alive slang vernacular and also a sense of humor,” she says. “And it’s so mouthy, but it has this kind of colloquialism that makes it feel really accessible, even though it has heft.”
Anna Christie’s entrance line—“Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby”—delivered as she takes a seat at a bar, steeling herself as she prepares to meet the estranged father she hasn’t seen for years, is, as Williams puts it, “one of the greatest opening lines ever.” It was also Greta Garbo’s first spoken line onscreen, in the play’s 1930 film adaptation, famously promoted with the slogan “Garbo Talks!” “There’s a lot of work to be done just to get the permission to speak that first line,” Williams says.
The creative team is full of longtime Kail collaborators: set design by Christine Jones and Brett Banakis; costumes by Academy Award winner Paul Tazewell; sound design by Nevin Steinberg; lighting by Natasha Katz; special effects by Jeremy Chernick; choreography and movement by Steven Hoggett. The original score, his first for the theater, is by Nicholas Britell, of Succession-theme fame.
Kail’s production will stay rooted in the play’s period. The physical world, he says, will be more evocative and representational than a literal bar and barge. “There’s something about the idea of being a little more suggestive and nonliteral that also feels like it lets the language and the actors elevate and go to the foreground of the story.”
In college, Kail wrote his senior thesis on O’Neill (“I don’t think anybody was rushing around to publish it,” he deadpans) and made a pilgrimage to the playwright’s summer house near the river in New London, Connecticut—the only real home O’Neill, whose father was a traveling actor, ever knew as a child. The house, Monte Cristo Cottage (named for the melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo, which his father starred in for decades), is the setting of his masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night and is now a National Historic Landmark. It also holds the desk on which O’Neill wrote Anna Christie. The staff let Kail stay inside and read Long Day’s Journey alone. He describes the experience as a kind of homecoming…an apt sentiment for Anna Christie, a play so preoccupied with belonging and return.
As the parents of young children, Williams says, “this is a big family undertaking” for herself and Kail. She, of course, embraces the complexity. “I do like to throw things up into the air and see what happens. I like to see what patterns are created when it all comes down.”
In this story: hair, Orlando Pita; makeup, Romy Soleimani; grooming, Melissa DeZarate; manicurist, Elle Gerstein for Essie; tailor, Cha Cha Zutic.
Produced by Modem Creative Projects.