Here’s an idea for an Anna Christie drinking game: Take a shot every time you hear “the old devil sea,” “dat ole devil sea,” “dat ole davil,” “damn ole davil,” or “dirty ole devil.” Come to think of it—don’t. You’ll be wobbly before intermission, and dead drunk by evening’s end. Unsurprisingly, an earlier version of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 play was called The Ole Davil.
In Anna Christie—a choppy revival just opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse—the sea is almost as big of a character as Anna (played by Michelle Williams), just reunited with her dad after 15 years apart; Anna’s father, Chris (Brian d’Arcy James), a Swedish coal-barge captain who’s lived his whole life on the water, which he views as some kind of Mephistophelean force; and Irish sailor Mat (Tom Sturridge, whose intensity is rivaled only by the thickness of his accent), who, shipwrecked on the deck of Chris’ boat, proposes to Anna even before he can stand up straight.
The play, which earned O’Neill the second of his three Pulitzer Prizes, is a bit of a curiosity, awash with language that’s both dated and jarringly colloquial—for instance, “beat it,” “what’s the dif?” and “put that in your pipe and smoke it.” It’s also a tragedy with a happy ending—or at least as happy as O’Neill gets. The already beaten-down Anna gets put through the emotional wringer before finally seeing a sliver of light: First, she must put her past behind her, which means telling her dad and would-be husband what she’s really been doing for the last few years, and how she landed in such dire circumstances. (The farming family, the “nice” cousins, with whom Chris entrusted Anna’s care? The older one raped her. “I hated him worse ’n hell and he knew it. But he was big and strong,” she says.) Then she’s forced to accept all manner of verbal abuse from Mat, every curse and insult pummeling her like a jab—not to mention withering looks of shame from Chris, who blames her downfall on (you guessed it!) “dat ole davil, sea.”
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Director Thomas Kail—best known for large-scale Broadway musicals such as Hamilton and the recent Sweeney Todd—doesn’t seem to have a fully formed vision for the production. (Perhaps it’s lost in the fog. Seriously…enough with the dry ice.) What he does have is a wonderful showcase for his wife, Williams, whose stage appearances—dating back to her daring 1999 turn in Tracy Letts’ trailer-trash Texas comedy Killer Joe—are far too infrequent for theater fans’ taste. She might not match O’Neill’s description of Anna (“a…girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion”), but she’s got the grit. Her “nobody owns me” speech to Mat and Chris—“I’ll do what I please and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do!”—is staggeringly good.
And is it me, or does she sound a lot like Gwen Verdon, the legendary singer-dancer she portrayed in the 2019 limited series Fosse/Verdon, which Kail executive produced? Musical-theater buffs surely remember that Verdon won one of her four Tony Awards starring in New Girl in Town, a 1957 Bob Merrill–George Abbott musical adaptation of Anna Christie.
Williams doesn’t necessarily sizzle opposite Sturridge, but his up-to-11 energy tends to overpower just about anyone and anything onstage. (Also, did we mention the occasionally impenetrable accent?) As the sea-fearing Chris, d’Arcy James—who’s having quite a year playing devoted dads, after his performance in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice—projects both patriarchal possessiveness and tenderness, even through a massive beard and Swedish accent. And the always-excellent Mare Winningham makes a too-brief appearance early in Act 1 as Marthy, a world-weary former prostitute and Chris’ longtime companion. Williams and Winningham downing a few drinks and bantering about everything from men to, yes, “the old devil sea”? That’s a scene that could have gone on and on.
Anna Christie opened Dec. 14 at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through Feb. 1, 2026. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
