REVIEW

Little Cat Feet…With Claws: Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie Takes to Sea in Red Hook

Reviewed by Brad Vogel - Published 10.19.22

“Sailors don’t do what good men do.” Nor, I learned during the course of On the Hook’s new floating production of Christie - a whittled down iteration of Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie - do people flying helicopters over New York Harbor.

 The roaring thwap-a-whap-a-whap of a low buzzing copter was one of the few intrusions that broke through the fog swirling heavily, both metaphorically and tangibly, inside the creaking hulk of the barge that hosted an immersive, perfectly-situated performance. The historic Lehigh Valley Railroad Barge No. 79, raised from muck by performer David Sharps and his family – who now live aboard the vessel off Red Hook – made for an powerfully atmospheric evening, a venue that gave the words of title character Anna Christie (the multi-talented Covi Loveridge Brannan, who also wrote the adaptation and co-produced) extra resonance: “It makes it feel as if I was out of it altogether.”

 For a play set aboard a barge being performed aboard a barge that existed when the play debuted 101 years ago…feeling fully transported was just what the doctor ordered. When a character went ashore…he actually disappeared up the gangway and went ashore. Nevermind that we were triangulated between the pearl necklace of the Verrazano Bridge, Lady Liberty’s torch, and the spire of 1 World Trade. For an hour, inside the hoary wooden walls with the entire barge jolting against its pilings at dramatic moments, we were out of it. If you’re going to see this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, experience it at this singular venue and no other. It’s fitting for a work by O’Neill: his inaugural play premiered in 1916 on a wharf in Provincetown.

 But Anna’s words, delivered as she whirled around the barge’s canted central post through a deluge of Neptune blue fog, her hopes high that the sea would cleanse her, had darker implications. This is an O’Neill play after all. And the line revealed the play to be far more of a pandemic play than one focused on climate change. When Anna’s wearied father Chris (Rick Benson) intones “fog, fog, fog all the time” as he looked out at Red Hook’s old Beard Street Warehouses out across the water, it felt as if he cried out on behalf of everyone aboard the barge of the extra weight we all still carry from over two years of pandemic haze.   

 And let’s be clear: there were plenty of villains in the mist stalking the caulked wooden planks of the barge’s deck. Men, fathers, johns, kindly love interests, sailors, the sea, cousins, and farms (especially farms) all had nearly as rough a night as the helicopter pilot by the time the play had wound its course. Broken bottles were brandished, bodies were thrown unceremoniously to the deck, and it was hard not to wince at points, as the audience is spliced into the free-wheeling action, arraying in a loose cozy horseshoe around the interior of the barge’s superstructure.  It got so bad at one point that a diminutive suspendered musician (water sprite? (Alyssa Chetrick)) had to enter the four walls of the play and come to the aid of Anna Christie who plunges her head into a full wash bucket, seemingly at her wits’ end in her fight to persist in the face of a devil sea of patriarchal forces.  

 Anna, we eventually learn as the play warms up from a somewhat cool and at times a tad cardboardy start aboard the coal barge dominated by her passionate-but-broken, clipped-Irish-tongued father (Benson)….has not been a nanny all those years after all. And in her final moment of total isolation and abandonment on deck, the fog, like the false goofy pomposity of her love interest, the stoker Mat Burke (played with alternately honeyed and grim gusto by Mike Sause) cleared for a spell with the naked light blaring over her. I felt a real, striking wave of pathos.

From there, the play appeared to be wrapping in that curious manner after Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: Jupiter suddenly descends as deus ex machina and voila, all wraps up in a happy, somewhat comedic way.  But we don’t know really know what happens on the sure-to-be-tense ship Londonderry bound for Capetown. Or to Anna, for that matter. And so we are left with lingering concerns that what seems to be resolved might not be. You could almost see the audience, as they chuckled nervously, wondering…will Anna get her fourth COVID booster?  Or maybe this is where the climate change angle crept in, a deeper subliminal thought emerging from the night as the Hurricane Sandy tenth anniversary approaches: will Red Hook itself be here a century from now?

 The lighting (Adrian Yuen), music, and sound (a whimsical James Vincent Murray) proved inventive and enhanced the experience – even the flickering of the LEDs in blue, green, and pink as the audience waited for the show to start as violinist (Chetrick) strode around coils of heavy cordage under blocks and tackle – was this an intentional attempt to make us feel we were peering back through the fogs of the past to the time of the action or just random as the show started without a formal cue, coming in like a slow tide?  At any rate, it worked.  Blow bottles and pan drumming accentuated the direction (Nicky Maggio) in unexpectedly fun and moody ways.

 By the time the audience applauded and barge regular and actor Stefan Dreisbach-Williams watched the lip of the gangway, tall as a foremast, while actors and audience filed safely ashore…I found myself wanting to agree with Anna Christie. Not with her and her father’s expressions of being tired and drifting off, nor with Mat’s flat, all-too-identifiable statement: “I am worn out.” But with Anna’s growing realization as the final shadows of emoting hands flung themselves across the planking: “No matter what I was, I’m no longer letting it get me.”

 As my feet touched terra firma once again, I looked back at the glow emanating from the big open barn door of the barge in the now-quiet night and wanted to say, as I trudged back into the lingering pandemic or whatever this is…me too, gurl, me too.