During a recent visit to Boston, we attended one of the final performances of a riveting production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie which closed on May 6, 2018. It was the first of four of his plays to win a Pulitzer Prize (the fourth was the iconic Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was produced and won the award posthumously). The Lyric Stage production, directed and adapted by Scott Edmiston, attempted to tighten and contemporize the compelling but cumbersome 1921 play. We have four acts abridged into a more manageable two with a running time of some hour each with intermission. Minor characters are jettisoned. The most significant surviving one of two is Marthy (Nancy E. Carroll) the hard-drinking, blousy, live-in barge mate of captain Chris Christopherson (Johnny Lee Davenport). After a couple of rounds of rotgut with the newly arrived Anna Christie (Lindsey McWhorter) she ships out to make room for the long-lost daughter of her old salt lover. The rough-hewn set by Janie E. Howland conflates a bar with the cabin of a barge. The unfinished texture of the wood creates an analogy for the lack of refinement and polish of the splintery characters. At key intervals in the drama, just as in O’Neill’s personal life, these transitions are accented by rounds of knocked back shots. The pace of the first act, including an awkward reunion of father and daughter, is as slow and creeping as the fog that rolls in. Quite literally, the dramatic tension and fulcrum washes up as the identifiably Irish stevedore Mat Burke (Dan Whelton). This drowned rat cleans up in a cheap, ill fitting suit and slicked back hair as a potential love interest and ensuing suitor for Anna who proves to be less eligible than initially assumed. By the second act, having established a back story, the production evolves into a three hander and dramatic hurricane. In this triangle the men are protagonists for the rent asunder, torn and tattered, vulnerable Anna. As is true for much of the massive O’Neill canon, the play draws from his horrendous life experience, in this instance, as an often down and out, stranded and abandoned, alcoholic merchant marine. The character of the captain is named for and inspired by one of his former shipmates. In the hierarchy of the sea, a captain, even as lowly as one who skippers a barge, by far outranks one of a gang of ruffians who shovel coal to stoke the fires in the bowels of a barge. This lowest of the low is not fit to pursue the hand of his less-than-pristine daughter. (Another O’Neill drama, The Hairy Ape, has an uncouth but earthy and sexually menacing, beastly stoker as its central character.) The playwright crafted Chris Christopherson and his daughter as Swedish, and it is usual to direct them with an accent. The norm is to play Anna to type as in the famous film version that starred Greta Garbo in her first talking picture. The Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann, the muse of the Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, played Anna on Broadway in the 1977 José Quintero revival. In a notable strategy of color-blind casting, Anna and her father are played by African-American actors. It is entirely plausible and works seamlessly in this production. This director’s decision has given us the always astonishing work of Johnny Lee Davenport. This formidable actor is well known to Berkshire audiences for many performances with Shakespeare and Company. Yet again, his work is so richly voiced, booming, and authentic that he tends to dominate and overwhelm the second act. The feisty, rough, and proletarian Dan Whelton ups his game in a toe-to-toe, violent confrontation. The audience is swept into this generational struggle which brings out the best of a younger player in conflict with an actor with more life experience and deeper chops to draw upon. Literally caught in the middle is the finely tuned and compelling Lindsey McWhorter who is tasked with the nuances of conveying an abandoned woman. Anna has suffered neglect, rape, and a two-year period as a prostitute. She has sought out her father for reunion, redemption, and salvation. Rather than taking charge of her own destiny, she is a rag doll being tossed about by the raging machismo of her father and lover. In despair, she opts to pack up and move on or back to the death thrall of a horrific past. That’s a lot to ask of any actress, and McWhorter navigates this brutal headwind with understated, angst-infused subtlety and grace—so much so that some reviewers of this production discuss the notion of O’Neill as a proto feminist while, in real life, he was better described as a misogynist. It is much to the credit of Lyric Stage that it has taken on a rich but challenging early monument. This is theater which, in order to remain vital, demands to be refreshed, deconstructed, and revitalized. The Lyric production accomplished that provocatively and magnificently.
