By Charlene Baldridge | SDUN Theater Critic 
The Old Globe opened Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna Christie,” March 15 in the White Theatre at the Conrad Prebys Theatre Center in Balboa Park. Directed by Daniel Goldstein, the play is part of the Globe’s “Classics Up Close” series, intended to reexamine American classics.
Premiering in 1921, the piece is set in a lowlife waterfront bar in New York City and on a coal barge plying local waterways and coastal ports, circa 1910. Major characters are Anna Christopherson, who referred to herself as Anna Christie; her errant yet loving father, Chris; Chris’s mistress, Marthy; and an Irish seaman saved from “That Old Devil Sea,” which looms large in Chris’s mind as bringer of bad things. In the past, with the death of Chris’s brothers and now, the Irish sailor. Chris would not want his daughter marrying a seaman.
In the play’s initial scene, the drunken Chris and Marthy hoist a few. He has received a letter from Anna saying she taking the train to live with him. Marthy is persuaded to move out, no hard feelings. Chris leaves and Anna arrives, neither Marthy nor Anna knowing initially who the other is. The scene between the frail yet strong Anna (Jessica Love) and the earthy, good-hearted Marthy (Kristine Nielsen) reveals everything onlookers need to know going forward. Anna’s come from Minnesota, where she’s been living with her late mother’s relatives since she was five years old. She does not remember her father, who takes her to the homey house on the barge and swears he will care for her the rest of her life.
Anna falls in love with the sea, even more so when it delivers up a half-drowned Irish seaman named Mat Burke (Austin Durant), a wild, brawling, beefy man who wants to settle down for love of a good woman. As played by Durant, Mat posses the same edgy combination of lout and lover as Tennessee Williams’ later Stanley Kowalski.
Chris (Bill Buell) is against the match for many reasons. Anna is reluctant to marry Mat, and when it becomes apparent that each of the two men wants to run her life, she sits them down and reveals her tawdry past, sending both off on a tear. The denouement is unexpected, even funny, although the Old Devil Sea seems to bode dark events.
Jessica Love is a less jaded Anna than remembered from the Greta Garbo film (her first talkie, in 1930). This Anna is appealing naive despite her hard life. As Chris, Bill Buell’s Swedish accent is at first a challenge to understand. Later in the play it seems inconsistent, fading in and out. Though he initially plays with a tad too much volume and bluster, some of his later scenes with Anna are most affecting. The most fascinating, well-performed and perhaps best-written character of all is Nielsen’s Marthy, who slips away at the end of Act I and never returns, at least in the play.
Goldstein’s production is tight and tense, an engrossing two and a half hours, with frightening fight scenes directed by George Yé. Scenes are played upon Wilson Chin’s imaginative set, lighted atmospherically by Austin R. Smith. Denitsa Bliznakova’s distressed costumes could not be better. One could almost smell the sea and sweat. I have a huge quibble with composer Chris Miller’s original music, a piano score that becomes intrusively loud and annoying in Paul Peterson’s sound design.
“Anna Christie” continues Tuesdays-Sundays through April 15 in the White Theater, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park. For more information, visit theoldglobe.com or call 619-23-GLOBE. Tickets are $29 – $69.
