By Matthew Wexler
If there’s anywhere to consider staging Anna Christie, it’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, a former tobacco factory once part of Brooklyn’s bustling industrial East River waterfront. Michelle Williams stars in a revival of the 1921 drama about a former prostitute attempting to make amends with her estranged father, reclaim her life, and maybe even find love.
Thomas Kail (Sweeney Todd, Hamilton) directs Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in an overly atmospheric production featuring incidental music by Nicholas Britell, scenography (including a beautifully lit sea of discarded beer bottles) by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, and otherworldly transitional movement by Steven Hoggett.
But for all of its thoughtful trappings, it’s difficult to consider Anna Christie the feminist triumph many claim it to be. Though she tells her father (a consuming Brian D’Arcy James) and new-found love Mat Burke (a crude, unpredictable Tom Sturridge), “I can make it myself—one way or other. I’m my own boss. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!”, we also find Anna at the play’s end pining for affirmation from a man she just met and who threatened to kill her.
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Premiering shortly after the 19th Amendment passed, securing women the legal right to vote, Anna Christie today feels like a museum piece best saved for theater history class. Still, those eager to see the Emmy winner and five-time Academy Award nominee will find Williams a deft interpreter of O’Neill’s text.
Williams hovers on the crest of these shifting social tides with nearly too much expertise, delivering a polish to Anna’s emotional navigation that outshines her father, who blames all of life’s woes on the sea, and a verbally stunted lover-to-be, who brands her a slut when learning of her past.
Not one to dwell on the past, Anna sums it up to her father: “We’re all poor nuts, and things happen, and we just get mixed in wrong, that’s all.” An awfully forgiving sentiment for a young woman abandoned by her sole surviving parent, raped by her cousin, forced into a life of sex work to survive, then cornered into justifying her actions by a misogynistic society that enabled it in the first place.
3 out of 5 stars
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Fast facts: ‘Anna Christie’ at St. Ann’s Warehouse
An intoxicatingly atmospheric production and committed performance from Michelle Williams can’t disguise that Anna Christie‘s version of female empowerment involves forgiving everyone who wronged you.
- St. Ann’s Warehouse, 45 Water Street, Brooklyn
- Running time: Two hours and 25 minutes, one intermission
- Performances through February 1, 2026
