Anna Christie is an early play of Eugene O’Neill’s, and though not as well known or staged as often as Desire Under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, or Long Day’s Journey into Night, it is still an important part of his oeuvre for what it signals about his artistic growth.
The play grew out of an earlier work called Chris Christopherson, which he transformed between the spring and fall of 1920. The earlier iteration premiered in Atlantic City in March of 1920 but folded before it made it to Broadway. There was another attempt with That Ole Davil, but it was not tested in production. Anna Christie was the third and final attempt.
Critics were not impressed by Chris, and O’Neill pushed back at them and at the audience he thought would not sit through anything long. He claimed Chris was “a technical experiment by which I tried to compress the theme for a novel into play form without losing the flavor of the novel.” He also ruefully told one of its actors that “It was a frank experiment in dramatic construction and evidently our public will not stand for such innovations. I am now rewriting the play on a more compact plan and hope it will gain intensity in the process.”
Anna Christie was a major success, but audiences concluded the ending was an unequivocal happy one and critics therefore found fault with that. O’Neill defended criticism of the play’s “happy” ending by writing to the New York Times and saying that he was trying to render “the dramatic gathering of new forces out of the old” and “have the audience leave with a deep feeling of life flowing on.” However, critic Zander Brietzke notes (quoted here in Daniel Boulos’ article “‘Anna Christie,’ Chris Christopherson, and dat ole davil Broadway”) that “audiences ‘literally did not see’ Chris as he spoke his final dread-filled lines because he was completely upstaged by Mat and Anna. ‘Visually and theatrically, the power of their romance erases all of the subtlety and ambiguity that O’Neill tried to plant in the play... Old Chris, so important in the first part of the play, virtually disappears in the wake of colliding sexual passions and the emotional tumult that satisfies the demands of great melodrama.’”
Writing for The Eugene O’Neill Review, Arthur Holmberg sums up some of the criticism: “Like O'Neill, scholars and critics have denigrated Anna Christie. Virginia Floyd dubbed it ‘a play gone wrong’... Frederic Carpenter complained that it ‘suffers from obvious faults.... Written by fits and starts, it lacked unity’… And many other distinguished reviewers have dismissed it as well. Brendan Gill, in a piece titled ‘Mal de Mer,’ describes O'Neill's dialogue as ‘pidgin English’ and puts the work down as ‘implausible and, at bottom, unpleasant nonsense.’ Clive Barnes deplored the writing as "labored to the point of torture." T.E. Kalem scorns it as ‘dross,’ John Simon (1977) as ‘creaky as a tin lizzie.’ Harold Clurman reviles it as ‘banal’ and ‘corny’; Rex Reed, as ‘idiotic.’”
Brietzke explains that “O'Neill gradually accepted more responsibility for the unwanted reactions to his work. Although Anna Christie enjoyed popular success, had a long run of 177 performances and earned O'Neill his second Pulitzer Prize, he began to despise the play and to rank it among his most conventional works. Later in the decade he even tried to exclude it from among his published ‘representative plays.’”
Anna Christie has been revived several times, the most notable being in 1966, 1977, 1993, and 2011. A 2025 revival with Michelle Williams received positive reviews. There have also been several film adaptations, the most famous of which was the 1930 version which starred Greta Garbo as Anna.
