Does it matter what the playwright wants?
A lot has changed in the 101 years since great-American playwright Eugene O'Neill began writing his play Chris, which explored the life of a Swedish coal barge captain Chris Christopherson and his motley crew of companions at Johnny-the-Priest's Saloon, inspired by a South Ferry bar that O'Neill himself would frequent in the days pre-Prohibition.
After an out-of-town trial run, O’Neill changed the play's title to Anna Christie, shifting his attention to the captain's daughter, a young prostitute seeking freedom from the life she has been forced into. The play opens with 20-year old Anna arriving at the saloon and meeting her estranged, seafaring father for the very first time. While Chris initially warns her of the tricks and temptations of the "ole devil sea", Anna resolves to stay with her father aboard the coal barge, to rest and get back on her feet. Hiding her true profession from both her father and Mat, the passionate Irish coal-stoker who is rescued by their crew while at sea, Anna is torn between meeting the expectations of the two men to ensure her safety and maintaining her own agency and independence.
The play explores themes of power dynamics, class prejudices, gender-relations, immigrant life in America, and family ties as they relate to the experience of lower class laborers. Lower class immigrants were ignored by both society and popular media of the time, and the structural inequalities oppressing these characters were an integral part of keeping the capitalist system and industrial economies of the time running. Sound familiar?
With Anna Christie, Eugene O’Neill was writing a play set in 1910 in the early 1920s. He was looking back on Progressive Era life, as he himself was experiencing the dawn of the Jazz Age and the aftermath of the First World War. The story is designed so an audience member witnessing the original Broadway production of Anna Christie would easily recall their own recent experience and empathize with the characters’ interactions with the Social Purity Movement, the criminalization of prostitution, the rise of non-European immigrant sentiment, naturalization of immigrants previously considered non-white (such as Italians and Irish), as well as early socialist and labor union movements, including the coal worker strikes which dominated NY harbor in the early 1910s. O’Neill also intended to emphasize the fact that his characters did not know the reality of the not-so-distant future, thereby encouraging audiences to both laugh and wince at the characters’ folly and rash decision making. Unlike the audience, these characters have no idea World War, Prohibition, and spikes in both nativism and consumerism are about to drastically change the landscape of American life.
Anna Christie achieved resounding success on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1922, yet O'Neill himself was puzzled by reviewers' "happy" interpretations of the play's ending. O’Neill responds to these reviews in a public “letter to the editor” saying, “In the last few minutes of ANNA CHRISTIE, I tried to show that dramatic gathering of new forces out of the old. I wanted to have the audience leave with a deep feeling of life flowing on, of the past which is never the past but always the birth of the future, of a problem solved for the moment but by the very nature of its solution involving new problems"*. It seemed to O’Neill that audiences and reviewers had missed the irony and tragedy of his play, and until his death, the playwright considered his second Pulitzer winning play a complete failure.
As 21st century citizens, we know much more about the future than both O’Neill and his early 20th century audiences. We have the privilege of understanding the long term social, economic, and environmental effects of the structures of capitalism, consumerism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and classism which O’Neill would tackle for the entirety of his career. It must also be acknowledged that since O’Neill was writing from his own perspective as a white Christian male, there are many experiences missing from his writings, especially in terms of race and gender.
So, if we know so much more about the future than O’Neill was able to know and even he himself dubbed Anna Christie a failure, is there room for this play in the current theatrical landscape? Why not put this one on the shelf, in favor of a fresh perspective on a situation more relevant to the here-and-now? Well, it’s not that simple. Society has evolved in so many ways, and yet the themes and human emotions that sparkle in O’Neill’s works still resonate deeply today. Furthermore, without being in conversation with the past, it will be exceedingly difficult to learn from past actions of humanity in order to rise to new heights of social justice and socio-ecological harmony.
To simplify the answer is a “yes and” or maybe even a “yes but”. The first option: “Yes there is room for this great American classic and there is room for new perspectives, writings, and creations”. Personally, I go so far as to say: “Yes there is room for this great American classic, but theater practitioners must prioritize socially-conscious, dynamic, and critical explorations of these works that further the dramaturgical experience of the work “as written” in order to inspire forward looking dialogue for the betterment of American life.
*Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 letter to Oliver Slayer (press agent) in response to prominent drama critic Alexander Woolcott’s New York Times review.
