“Anna Christie” at St. Ann’s Warehouse (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

A sweep of seaside fog engulfs the stage for much of Thomas Kail’s revival of Anna Christie at St. Ann’s Warehouse, foreboding, alluring, and taunting. Kail places Eugene O’Neill’s characters on shiftable square pallets, rearranged for each of the four acts, floating on the stage floor, or is it an inky black ocean? In this intimate, pared back staging, the characters are physically close – to us, to each other – but emotionally isolated – from each other, from us. 

Part of that is in the text. O’Neill’s play concerns Swedish coal barge captain Chris Christopherson and the daughter he hasn’t seen in fifteen years. Anna “Christie”, as she has refashioned herself, writes that she’s coming to New York to see her father and, hopefully, get a meal and a bed out of him. She’s been through the wringer, doing sex work and newly out from a hospital stay. She joins Chris on the barge and meets a shipwrecked stoker, Mat Burke: handsome, Irish, and animalistic. They have an instant attraction, though Mat doesn’t know about her past and her father would rather they not get involved.

It’s tightly focused, honed in on these three characters for most of the play. They each have their own emotional stymies that prevent them from connecting with each other. When it does happen, in a climactic scene at the end of the third act, there’s violence and then, something approaching passion. In its resolution, the play can be said to show its 104-year-old age – is it believable that Anna would forgive Mat for his actions so easily? 

In this production it is. Michelle Williams is over twice the age that O’Neill scripts Anna to be, but so much of the character makes more sense when she’s weathered more storms. Characters are always telling Anna how tired she looks and, even though Williams maintains her movie star luminosity, there’s a beleaguered sadness behind her eyes and a physical resignation in her shoulders. There’s an unsteadiness in her voice and the words come falling out on top of each other. She’s had to fight her way through the world and just when she thought she could stop for a second, there’s another fight ahead of her.

O’Neill writes both Mat Burke and Chris Christopherson’s dialogue in their conflicting dialects: Irish and Swedish, which makes it a challenge to read. Deborah Hecht’s dialect coaching for Tom Sturridge and Brian d’Arcy James renders it a bit more intelligible than O’Neill’s phonetic attempt on the page, but there are some instances where there’s just so much accent happening. People are shouting at each other, but essentially speaking different languages. It works dramatically, but doesn’t always translate to full comprehension for the audience.

Sturridge and James are both giving impassioned performances, though. Sturridge is operating on an intensity level that far exceeds every other performance, shoving Burke into a class of person that is definitively not the same as the Christophersons. It’s a snarling, furniture-kicking performance that can turn at any second into the kind of sexy bad boy that has been the catalyst of drama for eternity. James, playing older than he is behind a bushy beard, allows the love he has for Anna to come gushing out through his words and through his piercing eyes. O’Neill originally conceived the play to center Chris, and the remnants of that are still there: when James is left alone on the stage, with just the “devil sea” below him, it’s chilling, powerful stuff.

Kail has assembled an astounding team behind the scenes as well. Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’ scenography of modular pallets is overhung with a swinging steel beam that looms over the characters as if it could crush them at any moment. The back wall is one large garbage bin storing the thousands of used bottles from this cohort’s excessive drinking – it’s an O’Neill play, of course. Natasha Katz’s lighting captures that chilly New England sun-and-moonlight on the water. Naturally, Paul Tazewell’s costumes come close to stealing the entire show. Tazewell is skilled at using fabric texture and styling to level up his designs in their specificity to the characters. At such close proximity, everything is under scrutiny and, because of Tazewell’s impressive work, every detail tells the audience about the unspoken history of these characters.

It all comes together well, but doesn’t quite turn into something great. It’s a perfectly respectable production, but I’m not convinced the play has much to offer, despite its Pulitzer-winning bonafides. The central trio (and a marvelous one-scene performance from Mare Winnigham) make it worth seeing, but it’s not really the kind of play to generate excitement beyond that. Still, this is clearly a passion project for Kail and Williams and the results of their work are quite impressive.