Review: Michelle Williams finds the modern spiritual essence of Anna Christie at St. Ann's Warehouse
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Michelle Williams seems to have unlimited emotional access.Her inner intensity expresses itself in a frenzy of volcanic feeling that can never be tamped down once it reaches its boiling point.
There’s a fragility to her best screen work, a sense that at any moment her character might crack into a million pieces.In such films as “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “My Week with Marilyn,” she provides an X-ray into the women she’s portraying, exposing the cracks beneath the exquisitely observed facade.
In the Broadway production of “Blackbird,” Williams played a woman who confronts the older man who sexually abused her when she was 12 years old.Her character has tracked him down for a reckoning that is all the more anguished for being so dangerously ambiguous.
Anguish and ambiguity are perfectly compatible in the world that Williams inhabits.In the new revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” at St.
Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, she gets to display not only her patented emotionalism but also a strategic restraint that keeps every option open.The play, one of the few by O’Neill that swerves from tragedy to what might be called tragicomedy, allows Williams not only an opportunity to dive headlong into shame and resentment but also to withhold what she’s really thinking and feeling.
With an eye out for the next drink, she plays her cards as best she can in a game that’s rigged heavily in favor of the men.The play earned O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize for drama, but he fumed at the way critics accused him of copping out with what seemed to them a happy ending.
He didn’t think his resolution assured anyone of anything.In a letter to critic George Jean Nathan, he described the conclusion as “merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten.”L...