Johnny
He is the proprietor of the bar where the play is set, Johnny-the-Priest’s. He is pale, clean-shaven, blue-eyed, and white-haired, and seems mild-mannered. However, he is rather intense below the surface, "cynical, callous, hard as nails.”
Longshoremen
Two of them come in on their break from the sea to drink at the bar. They do not speak much and seem to be burdened by their work to the point that they need alcohol to relieve it.
Postman
He is the carrier who brings the letter from Anna to Chris.
Larry
A “boyish, red-cheeked, rather good-looking young fellow of twenty or so,” he tends the bar. He is kind to his customers and listens dispassionately to their affairs.
Chris Christopherson
He is a “short, squat, broad-shouldered man of about fifty, with a round, weather-beaten, red face from which his light blue eyes peer short-sightedly, twinkling with a simple good humor.” He walks with a rolling gait, is dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and speaks in a Swedish-tinged vernacular. He works on a barge at the time of the play, a change from his many decades at sea. That sea is his greatest enemy, he maintains, as he thinks it has caused him trouble in life. However, he was the one who left his wife and five-year-old daughter Anna in Sweden and did not visit, and even though they moved to America, he never bothered to establish contact or intervene when Anna was sent, following her mother’s death, to stay with relatives. When he reunites with Anna now, he is desperate to be a family with her and resents Burke’s presence. He has trouble coming to terms with Anna’s profession once he learns of it, and drinks himself into a stupor. At the end of the play he decides to get over it and ship himself out in order to financially support her, but though a kind gesture, it is more or less the same thing he did fifteen years prior.
Anna Christie
A “tall, blond, fully-developed girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion but now run down in health and plainly showing all the signs of belonging to the world’s oldest profession. Her youthful face is already hard and cynical beneath its layer of makeup.” After she was raped by one of her cousins (and in order to get out of thankless jobs, as she perceived them), she turned to prostitution. She visits her father in order to start anew, but it is not easy for her to navigate her father’s misunderstanding of her, his harmful past actions, as well as her burgeoning relationship with Mat Burke, while trying to carve out a new identity. She is eventually pushed to tell the men the truth about her past and vacillates between despair, resignation, and hope that things will turn out all right for her.
Marthy
She is a middle-aged, hard-drinking but affable woman with a past in prostitution and who is currently a companion of sorts to Chris. In her eyes “twinkles… a youthful lust for life which hard usage has failed to stifle, a sense of humor mocking, but good-tempered.” She recognizes what Anna is right away and is both kind to and tough with her. She agrees not to cause trouble for Chris by leaving the barge where she’s been staying with him.
Johnson
He is a deckhand for Chris.
Mat Burke
He is powerful, tall, and "handsome in a hard, rough, bold, defiant way.” He is about thirty and is “in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.” A sailor, he ends up on the barge because the sea sinks his boat. He immediately falls in love with Anna and wants to give up his philandering and drinking in seaports around the world. He cannot understand her refusal to marry him, especially as she clearly loves him. When she tells him the truth about her profession he is horrified and irate, cursing her and disappearing into drink to blunt his depression. He is eventually persuaded to give her another chance by the argument that she never actually loved any of those men and was born clean when she fell in love with him. At the end of the play he has unwittingly signed up to ship away on the same vessel as Chris.
