{"id":1605955,"date":"2025-12-15T13:42:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T18:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1605955"},"modified":"2025-12-15T13:42:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T18:42:20","slug":"review-michelle-williams-anna-christie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2025\/12\/review-michelle-williams-anna-christie\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Michelle Williams Navigates Choppy Waters in \u2018Anna Christie\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This production leans heavily on Michelle Williams to humanize a century-old script whose language can feel insistently blunt. Copyright \u00a92025 Julieta Cervantes<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Iteration is the dramatist\u2019s most basic tool; pet expressions make for character metadata. \u201cGosh-golly, Julie\u2026\u201d reminds us that Julie is Julie and the speaker\u2019s a dork. In the plays of Eugene O\u2019Neill<\/i>, verbal tics accumulate so thickly it verges on self-parody. Take The Iceman Cometh<\/i>, in which the author signposts the necessity of delusions, or \u201cpipe dreams,\u201d about 40 butt-numbing times. Spoon-feeding motif is one thing, but this is snaking a tube down the audience\u2019s throat. In his earlier and cruder Anna Christie<\/i> from 1921, O\u2019Neill uses the sea as an all-purpose metaphor for life\u2019s ups and downs, and he never lets us forget it. Swedish barge captain Chris Christopherson is forever harping on \u201cdat ole Davil sea,\u201d like a Dickens gargoyle stamped with his catchphrase. Meanwhile, Irish stoker Mat Burke\u2019s blarney is lousy with \u201cdivil\u201d this and \u201cdivil\u201d that. Seafarers are hella superstitious? Got it, Gene.<\/p>\n

Maybe O\u2019Neill\u2019s idioms got on my nerves because there\u2019s little in director Thomas Kail\u2019s staging to distract from them. Apparently, the great playwright\u2019s estate is strict about trimming text or easing up on ethnic accents, both of which would make an overwritten semi-melodrama such as Anna Christie<\/i> more palatable (even though the play is in the public domain). So St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse is home to a slavish rendition of a piece that, a century-plus on, shows its age. Her deck creaks, her hull leaks. This stage curio that last set sail during the Clinton era stalls outside the bay.<\/p>\n

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