A big star is coming to the small stage: Michelle Williams, the Emmy-winning, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress, will return to New York theater this fall to lead an Off Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 drama “Anna Christie.”
Williams, who was last on Broadway in 2016, will play the main character, a former prostitute who falls in love with a seaman. The seaman will be played by Mike Faist, who was nominated for a Tony Award for originating the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” and who then had a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of “West Side Story.”
The production is scheduled to run from Nov. 25 to Feb. 1, with a two-week break during the winter holidays, in a 450-seat theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” who is married to Williams. The two previously collaborated on the 2019 streaming series “Fosse/Verdon.”
“We met making TV about theater, and we always thought it would be fun to make theater together,” Kail said in an interview. He said he had long been interested in O’Neill — he wrote his college thesis on the playwright — and that Williams had long been interested in the role, which was originated on Broadway a century ago by Pauline Lord, and has been played since on Broadway by Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann and Natasha Richardson, and on film by Greta Garbo.
“Taking something that has existed in various forms, with multiple terrific productions over the years, and having the chance to be part of a lineage is something that I love about the theater,” Kail said, “and that’s certainly something that sparked when I started having conversations with Michelle about it.”
Williams has had a varied career since her breakout role in the television series “Dawson’s Creek.” She won the Emmy for “Fosse/Verdon,” was nominated for a Tony for the play “Blackbird,” and has been nominated five times for Academy Awards, for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Fabelmans.”
The production is being supported by the commercial producer Jeffrey Seller, who was a lead producer of “Hamilton,” “In the Heights” and the 2023 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” all of which were directed by Kail.
Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s, said Kail approached her last year to talk about the idea, intrigued by directing a show set partly on a barge at a theater that is on the Brooklyn waterfront. She quickly said yes. “I’m a big Michelle fan, thought it would be a great role for her to play, and an exciting experience for us,” she said.
The play’s tension is about whether Williams’s character can find acceptance for what she did to survive.
“This idea at the center of it is what it means to be the accumulation of all the things you’ve done,” Kail said, adding, “There’s something combustible and beautiful and complicated and theatrical about that.”
St. Ann’s fall season will also include “Weather Girl,” a one-woman climate-change play written by Brian Watkins, directed by Tyne Rafaeli and starring Julia McDermott. That show, scheduled to run from Sept. 16 to Oct. 12, was a hit last year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, transferred to London this year, and is produced by Francesca Moody, who also supported “Fleabag” and “Baby Reindeer.” Netflix is expected to develop “Weather Girl” as a streaming series.
St. Ann’s also plans to present a show by the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond, in a tribute to Marianne Faithfull, who died in January. That show, called “Flaming September,” will run from Sept. 24-28 at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church, which is where St. Ann’s Warehouse performed in the 1980s and 1990s, and where Faithfull recorded her live album “Blazing Away.” Bond’s show will be directed by Daniel Fish.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
The post Michelle Williams to Star in O’Neill Play on Brooklyn Waterfront appeared first on New York Times.
