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Anna Christie (Dover Thrift Editions)

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"Anna Christie," the play by the great U.S. writer Eugene O'Neill, won the Pulitzer Prize for the 1921-22 theater season. All these decades later, the play still packs an emotional punch. "Anna Christie" focuses on three characters: Anna, who has had a traumatic life in the United States; her father Chris, a Swedish merchant seaman; and Mat Burke, an Irish stoker who takes an interest in Anna. The play takes place in New York City and on Chris's barge.

"Anna Christie" is a compelling study of gender roles and expectations, ethnic conflict in the U.S., family ties and disruptions, the call of the seafaring life, and fatalism versus the embrace of free will. Particularly interesting is O'Neill's representation of various types of vernacular speech. Overall, a classic American play that deserves an ongoing reading audience.

... in staging Eugene O'Neil's 1920 drama "Anna Christie" is that it's a corny, dated melodrama. On the other hand, it's one of the best corny, dated melodramas in the repertoire. The language is undercooked. The central character Anna -- not Magdalena but close, a ruined woman of virtue -- is no longer plausible to psychologically sophisticated audiences. The drunken Swede, her father, with his vaudeville accent, and the roister-boister Irish sailor, her lover, with his brogue, are by now such overdrawn stereotypes that a modern viewer/reader will need to chuckle indulgently at the naivete of the American theater just ninety years ago. And then -- shades of Hell for a director in 2011! -- the play has a happy ending!

Any temptation to update the drama and pop the corn has to be resisted. "Anna Christie" is a period piece -- far more so than a Shakespeare comedy -- utterly time- and culture-bound. It's a porthole through which to view the mentality of America in its pre-modern rusticity. It needs to be corny because America in 1920 was all corn. It wants to be a melodrama because only melodrama seemed real to Americans then ... and I'm not sure much has changed in the worldview of Americans since. In short, dear director/producer, don't fight it! Play it as it is.

Perhaps that's why the 1930 adaptation of "Anna Christie" as a film was so paradigmatically perfect. It starred two veteran vaudeville exaggerators, George Marion as the sodden sailor father and Marie Dressler as his tramp trollop, along with Greta Garbo in her 'talkie' debut. Not only did Garbo come naturally to her Swedish accent but her human instincts were pure melodrama. The 'Magdalena' role of Anna Christie suited her perfectly because, I think, she "believed" in the archetype. Film-making in 1930, like the stage in 1920, was less than a generation past vaudeville, just emerging from the bombast and bathos of 19th Century theatrics. The script, the dramaturgy, the cinematography, and the acting styles are 'all of a piece.' Once again, dear viewer, don't fight it! Take it as it is!

O'Neill won his second drama Pulitzer with this tale of a prostitute's return to respectability in 1922. Anna Christie is really called Christopherson. The play is a rework of O'Neills older play called Chris Christophersen, where her father was the center piece. The father character is a bit of an involuntary clown because of his strong foreign accent. It was a good idea to shift the focus to the daughter.

Though she is a Swedish sailor's daughter - as in Sweden, Europe - she grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She lived with relatives, but her cousins treated her like a cheap farm hand and as a target for harassment. She ran away, became a nurse, then a working girl. She got jailed and fell ill and now she came to look for her dad, Chris, who is skipper of a coal barge on the East Coast. They have not met for 15 years. She wants to take a rest with him.

Her father wants her to stay out of the life of the sea. Predictably, he fails and she links up with another sailor. She decides to out herself for what she was to father and lover. A crisis evolves, predictably.

The play has not much to offer to keep my reading interest, but it might possibly work very well on the stage. An imaginative production and a strong cast might bring it to life.
The male characters are too predictable and well worn. Only Anna could really convince me. Hers is quite a strong role in her mixture of determination, insecurity, romantic longing, and defiant self-defense.

With the 1921 production of "Anna Christie," O'Neill's skills as a dramatist finally reached maturity. Entirely revamped from an earlier play ("Chris Christophersen"), this four-act drama depicts a headstrong young woman, Anna, who renounces her life as a prostitute and tracks down the father who abandoned her as a child. Enamored of his new charge and unaware of her past, Christopherson (O'Neill changed the spelling for this version) tries to pamper and protect the daughter he had neglected during her formative years.

Yet Chistopherson has issues of his own: now a captain of a coastal coal barge, he, too, has lived a seafaring live of loose morals and social irresponsibility. Believing that the vigorous demands and easy temptations of a sailor's career have ruined his own life, he has abandoned the sea for good. Confronted with a daughter who initially enjoys life on the ocean, he swears to keep her both from its influence and from the men who make their living from it--with predictable results.

When Anna falls in love with Mat, a stoker for a steamer, she finds herself torn between her father's expectations and her lover's demands, and she discovers that both men, like the clients from her previous life, are buffoonish cads and patronizing bullies. The third act, which depicts the inevitable three-side confrontation between Anna and her two "protectors," is one of the most skillfully scripted clashes in American theater.

The final act, alas, succumbs to a conventional melodramatic mawkishness. Yet overall the play is saved by the faithful rendering of sailor's speech, the emotional depth of its characters, and the (for its time) forward-looking presentation of social ills.

O'Neill's play is an excellent piece of modern theater, combining themes of naturalism and adding the discontinuity of modern life. Anna Christie is a character dangling in a corrupt world, subject to fate in any form: the devil sea, God, mysogyny and double standards, and her own whims. A great read!

I read this play a few weeks ago and I must say it's fantastic. Of course there are some parts that are disappointing, but Eugene O'Neill draws the characters in such a way that you cannot help but relate to them.

Anna is so strong, so independent, so conflicted, and so human! Even if some people don't like the ending, I think it makes sense the way it is.

Great read, short play, and I think I like it better than Long Day's Journey Into Night, although it's usually regarded as O'Neill's best work.

Amazing!!! The characters were wonderfully acted out and the relationship between father and daughter was such a gripping story.