They didn’t have fog like this back on the farm in Minnesota, and Anna Christopherson adores it. At nighttime on the deck of the barge her father captains, anchored off Provincetown, Mass., she soaks it in: the enveloping stillness, and the romance.
Life on the water is brand new to her, but it feels like what she’d been seeking all along — as “if this was the right place for me to fit in,” she tells her father, Chris, who until a week and a half ago was almost a stranger. At ease and in her element, she is annoyed when they hear, out of the darkness, a cry for help from shipwrecked sailors. It shatters her peaceful evening.
Then one of the survivors pulls himself onto the deck — bloody, filthy and boasting of his manfulness — and Anna’s tranquillity is gone for good. This is Mat Burke, a coiled spring of violence in the form of an Irishman, and he will win her heart faster than you would think.
“Is it dreaming I am?” he says when she appears, offering a glug of whiskey. Then, having downed it and gotten his bearings: “I thought you was some mermaid out of the sea come to torment me.”
In Thomas Kail’s luminous and mesmerizing revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama “Anna Christie,” which opened on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge play the tumultuous lovers. Her lonesome Anna is amused by Mat and happy to let him adore her; his peacocking Mat is a terror yet given to disarming gestures, like fantasizing about their blissful picket-fence future just minutes after they meet (she looking New England chic in an oilskin coat; costumes are by Paul Tazewell).
The thing about Anna is that for the past two years in Minnesota, where she went by the name Anna Christie, she worked as a prostitute. When, at the play’s start, she travels east to New York, it’s because she needs to convalesce. She hopes her father, a Swedish immigrant, whom she hasn’t seen in 15 years, will put her up. On arrival, she spills all this to Chris’s self-possessed companion Marthy Owen (Mare Winningham, such an ace that you wish the role were bigger).
Portrayed by Brian d’Arcy James with a bushy white beard and a fond kindliness, Chris is not a bad guy, however harmfully he erred in abandoning his young daughter to the care of cruel relatives after his wife died. He has a stubborn conception of the grown-up Anna as an innocent who still needs shielding from profanity, alcohol and (he’s quite nuts on this point) the “old devil sea.”
Anna is 20, by the way; Williams is 45. That barely matters, because Anna’s age is not the point. The point is her trying to take control of her life, given the stifling options that a paternalistic, misogynistic society will allow circa 1910, when the play is set. One obstacle, actually, is Anna’s internalized sense that her work history means she is no longer worthy of matrimony.
Williams, who is married to Kail, smartly and credibly makes Anna a code-switcher: part tough talker; part rural heartlander with broad, prairie vowels; part proper lady, the most recently assumed of her identities. Each provides a kind of armor.
Nothing can protect her, though, from the condemnation that comes after her own honesty drives her to disclose her past to Mat and Chris — each of whom placed her on a pedestal of his own creation, and each of whom, apparently, has had sex with prostitutes without judging himself fallen.
When the rageful Mat, a mess of a man, tells Anna that he has “a good right to smash your skull like a rotten egg,” you may start mentally urging her to run and never look back. She remains convinced that he is a prize.
It makes organic sense for this drama to be revived on the (now glamorous) East River waterfront at St. Ann’s, whose view of the Brooklyn Bridge is so similar to the view in the 1930 Greta Garbo film “Anna Christie.” Like that movie, Kail’s airy production shrugs off the visual gloom that might easily oppress the play.
The set, by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, is both sculptural and modular, with one giant industrial beam hanging overhead like a Richard Serra mobile, and down below an abundance of wooden pallets rearranged in dreamy scene changes. Natasha Katz’s moody lighting, Jeremy Chernick’s fog and Nicholas Britell’s original music shape the ambience, and movement by Steven Hoggett adds touches of grace verging on magic.
Late in the performance I saw, the loud hiss of fog machines twice went unmasked, jarringly. But that was an unusual misstep in what seems very much like a post-pandemic return to A-game artistry and experiential elegance for St. Ann’s — an intoxicating New York blend of grit, cool and stardust.
Anna Christie Through Feb. 1 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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