ANNA CHRISTIE
Now the Next Theatre is doing Anna Christie, one of the weakest plays Eugene O’Neill ever wrote. Even he hated it. “I couldn’t sit through it without getting the heebie-jeebies and wondering why the hell I wrote it,” the playwright wrote to a friend after seeing a revival in 1941, 20 years after it premiered.
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But once again a Next Theatre production has been saved–by two outstanding performances. Linnea Todd plays Anna with so much insight and complexity that she almost makes plausible the character’s unlikely transformation from prostitute to virginal lover. And Si Osborne, who is rapidly becoming one of the most versatile actors in Chicago, plays her Irish lover with so much strength and charm that he wins the audience over quicker than he does Anna.
In the process, O’Neill transformed Anna from a sweet, tea-drinking secretary with an English accent into a whiskey-swilling, man-hating prostitute. Yet–and this is the fundamental problem–he clung to his original plot. Instead of recognizing that character must dictate plot, the young playwright–who had written mostly one-acts up to this point–tried to fit the new Anna into a preexisting narrative. This forced him to combine his two versions of her, and as a result the hard, bitter prostitute of the first act becomes a soft, romantic lover later on. It’s a dubious transformation, to say the least.
The rest of the production, under Harriet Spizziri’s direction, is good enough. Matt DeCaro seems uncomfortable as Chris, as though the Swedish accent takes up too much of his concentration, but he still manages to convey the old man’s foolish attempt to blame all his troubles on the sea. And Robert G. Smith’s set provides vivid locales for the saloon, the barge, and the inside of Chris’s cabin.
