Michelle Williams’s Suppressed Vitality Diminishes Brooklyn Revival of O’Neill’s ‘Anna Christie’

The last time “Anna Christie” was produced on Broadway, more than 30 years ago, Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama provided a love match for two celebrated actors who wound up marrying about a year later. The late Natasha Richardson played the titular Anna Christopherson, a young woman whose hard-knocks life at one point led her into prostitution, and Liam Neeson was cast as Mat Burke, the Irish sailor who falls in love with her.I wouldn’t expect the same fate for the stars of the new revival of “Anna Christie” that just opened at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse. For starters, Michelle Williams, who plays Anna to Tom Sturridge’s Mat, is already married to the director, Thomas Kail, who rose to prominence helming “In the Heights” and “Hamilton” for Lin-Manuel Miranda.Ms. Williams and Mr. Kail had an on-set romance as well, when he directed her in the 2019 miniseries “Fosse/Verdon.” The actress brought intelligence and spunk to her portrait of Gwen Verdon, the renowned dancer and actress, just as she had to numerous screen roles and some stage projects. The latter included a Broadway production of “Cabaret,” in which Ms. Williams captured the scrappiness and desperation of showgirl Sally Bowles, another role played earlier by Richardson.Similar qualities are perceptible in Ms. Williams’s Anna, but they seem much dimmer, invoking a woman whose inner light has been all but snuffed out. That’s understandable to an extent, given Anna’s history: After losing her mother as a very young child, she was left by her seafaring father with relatives who treated her, she recalls, like a slave; one assaulted her, setting into motion her downward spiral.We meet Anna as she is reunited with her dad, the Swedish-born Chris, now the captain of a coal barge. In this opening scene, set in a bar, Ms. Williams projects a reticence and weariness that are entirely appropriate — even if her alternately snide and affectless manner of speaking and vague accent suggest a gun moll giving her mobster beau the cold shoulder.That bitterness and strained aloofness only seem to increase, though, after Chris brings Anna back to the barge and she meets and falls for Mat, who has been rescued from a shipwreck. It gradually becomes clear — or did to me, anyway — that Mr. Kail and Ms. Williams have opted to depict Anna as not just hard-bitten, but driven somewhat mad by her dark experiences.This might have been an interesting choice, if it had been pulled off in a more stageworthy fashion, one that allowed Ms. Williams to truly engage with other actors or the audience. Instead, her Anna paces like a lost soul, seeming ghostlike and oddly girlish at certain points and simply off the rails at others — whenever she rants about her well-earned hatred of men, for instance.This leaves little opportunity for developing much chemistry with Mr. Sturridge, who despite sounding more Scottish than Irish, down to an exaggerated burr, is more compelling, evoking the brute force of Mat’s stormy passions and the vulnerability and decency underlying them. And Brian d’Arcy James is downright wonderful as the gruff but tender-hearted Chris, who is forever cursing “dat ole davil, sea” and her “dirty tricks.”Mr. Kail and movement director Steven Hoggett can lapse into the kind of stilted theatrics that marred their recent Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” in which production numbers featured cast members swaying in unison like students at a high school choir recital. Men obviously representing the horrors of Anna’s past hover like brooding shadows; in one scene, in an overwrought attempt to embody Mat’s and Chris’s despair, Messrs. Sturridge and d’Arcy James fall backwards into those men’s arms.Such pretentious flourishes cannot, unfortunately, inject more life into an “Anna Christie” whose accomplished leading lady has either chosen or been encouraged — a little of both, I suspect — to suppress her own vitality.

Michelle Williams’s Suppressed Vitality Diminishes Brooklyn Revival of O’Neill’s ‘Anna Christie’

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