The nineteenth century was the Golden Age of the fallen woman.  Although prostitution has existed in many societies as a complex and venerable institution—transgressive sex is part of la condition humaine—nineteenth-century artists, literary, visual and musical, were obsessed with the demi-mondaine.  The “Victorian adulation of the family and its associated virtues seems to have been matched only by the Victorian preoccupation with vice” (Nocklin 199-201).  From Balzac and Dickens to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, from Courbet and Manet to Degas and Cézanne, from Donizetti and Verdi to Massenet and Puccini, the prostitute reigned over the hearts of artists with as much grace as she reigned over fashion (Bernheimer; Braun; Clayson; Holmberg, 1980).

 

Although fascination with the prostitute never waned, attitudes towards her changed dramatically as the nineteenth century progressed.  For the Romantics she embodied the belief that love can purify the impure and cleanse the unclean.  When Violetta expires at the end of La Traviata, she affirms that the power of love has caused her to be reborn; and in Dumas fils' thesis play, the source of Verdi's opera, Marguerite's maid gently whispers to her dead mistress: “Sleep in peace.  You will be greatly pardoned because you have greatly loved” (Alexandre Dumas, fils, La Dame aux camélias, V. ix., trans. Holmberg).  For the Romantics, love—always proved through sacrifice—not only ennobles, it redeems.  “Ton amour,” Marion Delorme breathlessly confides to her young lover Didier, “m'a fait une virginité” (Victor Hugo, Marion Delorme, V.ii.).  This tradition, which asserts the moral superiority of the prostitute over the self-righteous bourgeois who condemn her, reached its literary peak with Sonya in Crime and Punishment.

 

If the Romantics had spiritualized the prostitute, the Naturalists soon corrected that aberration.  They gave her back to the world, the flesh and the devil.  The Romantics had turned the prostitute into an icon of transcendent love.  Zola wrote Nana to give the lie to this moonshine.  Claiming scientific objectivity, Zola portrays sex as a brute instinct, an appetite that must be fed.  Human beings are the sum of their appetites, nothing more.  When the stomach rumbles, eat.  When the skin itches, scratch.  Sex is a natural part of life with no metaphysical dimensions.  The Naturalist prostitute, placed in a meticulously described and deterministic environment, represents fast money and fast sex.  In Zola's panorama of the Second Empire, everyone is cheating and cheating on everyone else in a mad scramble for profit and pleasure.  Unlike the Romantics' courtesan, redeemed through love, the Naturalists' whore, driven by instinct and trapped by fate, hastens to a miserable end.  On the last page, Zola describes in sensuous detail the suppurating corpse of Nana.

 

In Long Day's Journey Into Night, James Tyrone fulminates against his son Edmund's favorite authors: “Where the hell do you get your taste in literature?  Filth and despair and pessimism!...  Whoremongers and degenerates!...  Your dirty Zola!”  (O'Neill 1955, 134-135).  The book which gave Zola his notoriety for filth was, above all, Nana.

 

When Anna Christie walks through the door at Johnny-the-Priest's, she looks, talks and acts as if she had just stepped from the pages of a Naturalist novel: hard-bitten, down-at-the-heels, alcoholic, desperate.  She comes, of course, from the Naturalists' favorite social stratum: the bottom.  And there seems no way up or out.  “You're me forty years from now,” she tells Marthy with grim humor—a worn-out hooker too old to earn enough money for a drink (O'Neill 1972, 75).  Her past is dreary, her future bleak.  The tale of woe she recounts about how she got started is genuine, pure Zola.

 

A change in the ideal of feminine beauty paralleled this shift from the Romantics' courtesan to the Naturalists' whore.  Although the search for beauty is universal, what one sees as beautiful and sexually desirable is socially constructed and mandated by fashion.  Thus, the portrait that has come down to us of Alphonsine Plessis (1824-1847), the real-life prototype of the lady of the camellias, stares timidly out at us with sad, limpid eyes, set in a frail, porcelain face.  Long black ringlets frame a swan-like neck that rises from a diaphanous cloud of white tulle, chastely decorated with a white camellia.  This ideal of feminine beauty—delicate, ethereal, angelic—denies female sexuality.  The great Romantic ballerina Marie Taglioni, whose dancing en pointe in La Sylphide took Europe by storm, did much to popularize this image.  Fashionable Parisians went on crash diets to acquire the desired, anorexic figure.  The French even coined a new word to describe the torture by which flesh and blood would metamorphose into a graceful sylph, lighter than thistle-down: taglioniser (Kirstein 243-246; Fonteyn 201-213).  Romantic heroines, of course, always die young, and the disease of choice was tuberculosis (Sontag 12-17, 21-29).  O'Neill's Anna Christie shows symptoms of this disease in Act One.

 

Nothing could be further removed from the air-borne sylph cherished by the Romantics than the Rubensesque beauty who succeeded her.  In the second half of the nineteenth century, corpulence supplanted frailty in the desired body.  As the century wore on, the ideal female grew stouter and older.  Fashions in anatomy change as rapidly as those in clothes, and the body's erogenous zones keep shifting to draw attention first to one part of the female, then another.  During the course of the nineteenth century the male gaze fixed successively on sloping shoulders, waists, necks, ankles, bosoms and rear ends, the last glorified by the bustle.  “Fashion,” Quentin Bell asserts “is the grand motor force of taste” (Bell 89).  He might have added that fashion drives the libido.  (On how fashion dictates the ideal body type, see Gilman, Hollander, and Lurie 60-83).

 

Manet's painting of Nana exemplifies the robust ideal that reigned when the Naturalists' whore came into vogue.  Standing before her boudoir mirror, primping with lipstick and powder, Nana en déshabillé stares brazenly out at the world.  Unlike the demure, melancholic Alphonsine, Nana bubbles over with animal joy.  She has no greater aspiration than to consume wealth and men.  She knows how to jolly a man up but insists on getting as much pleasure as she gives.  Her body is generously proportioned: broad white shoulders droop into well-fleshed arms; swelling bosom tapers down to wasp waist, painfully contained by a corset.  This artificially constricted waist emphasizes the bulk below: ample curves invite the spectator to savor her hips and rear.  The white lace of her slip ends at mid-calf, revealing a well-turned leg, made all the more alluring by silk stockings and black heels. In short, Nana's perfectly S-curved body represents what late-Victorians admired as a “fine figure of a woman.”

 

Before turning to O'Neill's brilliant parody of these two contradictory attitudes towards the prostitute, one must note that despite their differences, both the Romantic idealization and the Naturalistic demonization arise from an unconscious fear of female sexuality.  The Romantic courtesan and the Naturalistic whore must be punished with death for claiming their sexuality.  Thus, what Julia Kristeva calls the Law of the Father is reaffirmed.  As Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and The Devil dramatize, many men hate the female because the female arouses them sexually.  Female sexuality is power, and female power terrifies many men.  This fear forms the subtext of Zola's description of Nana's debut in Parisian operetta:  “Venus arrived.  A shiver went round the theater.  Nana flaunted her nakedness with serene audacity, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh....  Suddenly, the good little girl had become a woman, a disturbing woman who brought with her all the madness of her sex, opening up unknown regions of desire.  Nana still smiled, but it was the pointed smile of a man-eater....  Every man felt her power.  The heat from this bitch in rut filled the theater with lust” (Zola 53, transl. Holmberg).  Consequently, although prostitution is tolerated in societies whose official religious and political ideologies condemn it to protect family values, the prostitute herself is stigmatized because of her sexual power and the panic it elicits.  If a female provokes male lust, she ipso facto is guilty, not the man, because sin, the Bible tells us, entered the world through woman.  O'Neill's Anna Christie, a farce with a thesis, unravels this hypocrisy with rapier wit.

 

As a struggling young artist, O'Neill conducted a significant amount of sociological research on prostitutes in a notorious district of Manhattan affectionately dubbed the Tenderloin.  As the Gelbs point out in their masterful biography, “O'Neill made a firsthand study of young girls with painted faces and sad histories.  Those babes gave me some of the best laughs I've ever had,' he once confided to George Jean Nathan, and to the future profit of many a dramatic scene'” (Gelb 125).  No male bravado here.  The Gelbs note that besides Anna Christie, fourteen “streetwalkers ply their trade in seven other of his published plays; additionally prostitutes figure as offstage characters in another five plays” (Gelb 125-126).

 

O'Neill had a soft spot for prostitutes; throughout his life he defended them gallantly.  O'Neill's statements about the world's oldest profession read like a Naturalist tract.  For him, tarts, to use his word of predilection, were hapless victims of circumstance, trapped by the malice of fate (Gelb 126-127; 290).  Anna Christie follows this line of self-defense (all the characters in the piece shirk moral responsibility).  But the play, while not dismissing, certainly questions Anna's position—and O'Neill's.  The issue is not as innocent as it might appear.  What is at stake is the idée fixe of Western philosophy: free will versus determinism and the concomitant implications of choice and responsibility.

 

What any artist says he believes and what one of his creations may communicate often contradict each other.  Charles Dickens' novels are much more revolutionary, angry and apocalyptic about the British social and political system than Dickens, loyal subject of her Majesty the Queen, could ever acknowledge.  Artist and man, Proust observes, are often at loggerheads.  One must always listen to whatever any artist says about his work, but one must listen skeptically.  To varying degrees, artists are unaware of what their imaginations have created (Woolf 224).  Years of working with some of the greatest playwrights and directors in the world while I was literary director of the American Repertory Theatre taught me that all artists, when talking about their work, are conscious or unconscious liars.

 

In Anna Christie, O'Neill has fashioned a complex, ambiguous portrait of the prostitute and her function in society.  He does so by evoking two contradictory traditions of the prostitute—the Romantic versus the Naturalist.  Through a complex system of allusions, O'Neill plays one tradition off against the other, and the resultant irony questions both traditions without destroying either.  The infinitely complex woman he shows us in Anna Christie escapes any easy categorization.  She draws her breath from both traditions, and transcends both.  She is one of O'Neill's greatest creations and one of the most seductive women in the canon.

 

O'Neill did not rate the play highly.  “The play gave him trouble from the beginning,” the Gelbs tells us, “and O'Neill never felt he had brought it off” (389,397,435,481).  He found the end particularly troublesome.  Even more troublesome was the reaction of critics and audiences who considered it happy.  Reading between the lines of O'Neill's various pronouncements about the play, one senses that the real reason he abjured it was the accusation of critics that he had tacked on a happy end to insure a big Broadway success.

 

Taking their cue from the author, literary critics have failed to value Anna Christie as the major achievement it is.  To appreciate the sophisticated literary and psychological game O'Neill is playing, one must know the two traditions of the prostitute he parodies and understand how he simultaneously mocks and maintains both traditions.  To increase the irony, the playwright also juxtaposes theatrical techniques from many different genres.  Moving beyond established rules for dramatic structure, our postmodern sensibility can do without the neo-classical conventions of unity, enabling us to relish the potpourri of genres O'Neill stirs together for ironic tension: romantic melodrama, boulevard comedy, problem play, satire, psychological realism, farce.  This mixing of genres and tones disgruntled earlier generations of critics.  For us, it provides a multifaceted prism by which to view the events and characters from different and opposed viewpoints (Holmberg, 1995).  Furthermore, not all literary critics experience drama in the theatre, the acid test.  The ultimate yardstick for a play is whether it plays.  A play cannot be judged by literary criteria.  It must be judged by theatrical criteria in which the literary may or may not play a part.  In Anna Christie the fledgling playwright shows breathtaking dramatic flair.  He has a sixth sense about what will work theatrically, and great directors and actors have demonstrated the stageworthiness of Anna Christie, illuminating it with the radiance only a brilliant performance can ignite.

 

Anna Christie (1930), as every movie buff knows, was Garbo's first talkie, and the film remains one of her finest performances, taking its place in the pantheon alongside Camille, Queen Christina, and Ninotchka.  But Garbo hated the part and at first refused.  Garbo, the epitome of elegance and refinement, abhorred the play primarily because she felt that O'Neill, portraying Chris Christoferson and his daughter as vulgar, had no inkling about how real Scandinavians talked, thought or acted.  The play, Garbo sniffed, “is degrading to Swedes” (Orlandello 28).

 

But M-G-M stoked the pressure on Garbo.  Worried about her accent, the studio had delayed her debut in talkies as long as possible.  The talkies had tolled the death knell for more than one major career, and almost all the European imports had already packed their bags for home.  The Kiss (1929), Garbo's last movie before Anna Christie, officially marks the end of the silent era.  The M-G-M moguls, under the impression that inhabitants of Minnesota speak with Swedish accents, considered Anna Christie a safe vehicle for launching Garbo in the talkies.

 

Despite her antipathy to the play, Garbo acquiesced when Irving Thalberg put his financial foot down.  Garbo, celebrated for her parsimony, had lost her money in the crash of 1929.  She needed dollars, and Thalberg threatened to keep the purse strings tightly drawn unless she played Anna (Orlandello 28).  Frances Marion, the play's screen adapter admonished Thalberg that if he blustered too vehemently, Garbo, whose contract did not stipulate that she had to speak, might return to Stockholm in a huff.  With characteristic cynicism, Thalberg replied, “No, she won't.  The Beverly Hills bank where she kept her savings went under” (Payne 175).

 

O'Neill's foreboding that the glamorous star's presence in the film would overshadow the author's proved prophetic.  “Garbo talks!” trumpeted the marquees, and in the publicity stills released by M-G-M, showing Garbo in her cloche hat, lifting the infamous shot of whiskey to her pursed lips, O'Neill's name is nowhere to be found.  To increase the suspense, director Clarence Brown sagely delayed Garbo's entrance for over thirty minutes, well into the second reel.  When bartender Johnny-the-Priest finally opens the “ladies' entrance,” Garbo, her tall, thin silhouette elegantly etched in the doorway, takes a wary look around, slouches to a table, drops her valise to the floor, sinks into a chair.  Before we hear her speak, the camera—slowly, lovingly—registers Garbo's aura, an aura some of our greatest men of letters have struggled to pin down (Roland Barthes 56-57; Bela Balazs 285-287; Alistair Cooke 120-123; Graham Greene 25, 272; François Mauriac 42-47; Parker Tyler 9-31 in McGregor; Kenneth Tynan 48-49, et al.).

 

At last, we hear the voice we've been longing for: “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side.  And don't be stingy, baby” (O'Neill 73).  Only a great artist like O'Neill can conjure poetry from such prose.  Critics who complain about O'Neill's tin ear have not listened carefully enough.  But audiences did listen, and Garbo's voice—dark resonant, haunting, a mix of Bourbon and molasses—triumphed.  In Outlook, Creighton Peet wrote that Garbo's voice “is the deepest I have ever heard in a woman ... so deep and mannish that when she says I love you, I love you,' it is necessary to look twice at the screen to know whether it is she or Charles Bickford [Mat Burke] who is talking” (Orlandello 29).  In Picture Play Norbert Lusk wrote, “The voice that shook the world!  It's Greta Garbo's, of course, and for the life of me I can't decide whether it's baritone or bass” (McGregor 89).

 

Anna Christie came at a turning point in Garbo's career, not only because of the talkies, but also because her image was undergoing a sea change.  For many reasons M-G-M was beginning to desexualize Garbo's persona.  Garbo herself was maturing, and the mood in the country was sobering up in response to the Depression.  The Roaring Twenties were over.  Flappers dancing the night away now seemed frivolous; austerity was the order of the new day.  Furthermore, a censorious climate in Washington would soon scare Hollywood into accepting a Production Code in lieu of direct government intervention.  The pictures Hollywood churned out in the twenties and early thirties still titillate with their urbane treatment of sex.  Movies today may show flesh in action, but they lack altogether Hollywood's earlier sense of Anacreontic playfulness and poise.  In their insouciance, Hollywood's sex comedies of the 20s and early 30s descend from Restoration drama.  Needless to say, a chorus of Mrs. Grundies became more and more perturbed by what it perceived as licentiousness.  By 1934, the high-toned Production Code, authored by Will H. Hays, had put the damper on Hollywood's high spirits.  Among its strictures the Code—easy on violence but hard on sex—insisted that the “sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.  Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationships are the accepted or common thing.  Lustful kissing, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown.  Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.”

 

When one sees Garbo in the mind's eye, one remembers her from the talkies made during the final phase of her career: Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1937)—all theme and variations on one grand narrative retailing the Romantics' mythology of love.  A woman of the world has idled her life away in a series of unhappy amours.  She finally meets a man worthy of her greatness of soul and is regenerated by the purity of this amour-passion.  But fate and the patriarchy will otherwise, and the star-crossed lovers must part.  He goes off to a brilliant career in diplomacy or the military.  She stays behind to weep and wilt.  “Guilt and misery and passion, these suit the melancholy grandeur of [Garbo's] voice,”  writes Graham Greene, and “the word doom' is frequently in the mouths of these characters” (Greene 26).

 

Garbo, who suffered beautifully, embodied this Romantic icon better than anyone else.  E.T.A. Hoffmann defined the essence of Romanticism as infinite yearning, and the combination of yearning and melancholy in Garbo's eyes evoked like no other face the wellsprings of tragedy.  Whenever I see the final image of Queen Christina—Garbo staring fixedly out at a vast expanse of futility—Walter Pater's description of La Gioconda comes to mind: “Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,' and her eyelids are a little weary.  It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.  Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!” (Pater 115).

 

But Garbo the Romantic icon is only half of Garbo's story.  In the silent films she'd made in the twenties, before the Production Code shook its reproving finger, Garbo sizzled with an eroticism that startles.  One does not expect such sexual energy from such aloof beauty.  In one big bang, her combination of fire and ice collapses the categories of madonna and whore, creating the Garbo enigma.  When she gives her victims a come-hither stare, she turns sex into a mystic experience.  Hollywood exploited the young Garbo as a dangerous femme fatale, a woman whose sexual prowess leads men astray.  We're back in the Naturalists' domain of woman as vamp.  Although it's hard to keep a strict score, in The Torrent (1926), her first American film, Garbo had thirty-nine affairs.  She dominated her leading men, psychologically and sexually.  Her lovers seem strangely passive as they lay their heads in her lap, awaiting decapitation.  In silent film after silent film—the titles tell all: The Temptress (1926), Flesh and the Devil (1927), A Woman of Affairs (1929), The Single Standard (1929)—Garbo portrayed a woman whose sexuality threatens the patriarchy.  Turning brother against brother and friend against friend, she refuses to be a sexual object of exchange and demands to be a sexual subject, thus disturbing the equipoise of male homosocial bonds (Sedgwick).  Watch Garbo embrace John Gilbert (Flesh and the Devil).  See her body quiver with delight as, like Dr. Faustus' Helen, she makes him immortal with a kiss, sucking forth his very soul (Christopher Marlow, Dr. Faustus, V.i.100).  If in the 30s Adrian covered Garbo's body up under billows of historical ruffles and bustles and furbelows, in the 20s designers uncovered her in costumes that focussed attention on her anatomy.  Of course, in the end female rapaciousness must be punished, and the Garbo vamp usually wound up badly—smashed to smithereens as her sports car careened off the road or falling through the ice and drowning in a watery grave.  Thus is the male sense of justice served, and moral order restored.

 

Anna Christie, then, came as Garbo femme fatale was transmogrifying into Garbo Romantic icon.  The complexity of her performance as Anna comes from the tension she creates by projecting both images.  World-weary when she invites the wharf rat Marthy (the incomparable Marie Dressler) to a drink, Romantically yearning when she tells her father that the sea has cleansed her, disturbing femme fatale as she swaggers around the barge braless in a tight sweater, arousing the lust of both Mat and her father.  Garbo—tall and lanky but with sufficient cleavage to be interesting—had the ideal body type for the thirties.  If the twenties privileged a boyish look that obscured secondary sexual characteristics (Clara Bow), and the fifties rediscovered voluptuousness (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollabrigida, Sophia Loren), the thirties favored the elegant, streamlined vertical of Garbo (Lurie 74-78; McCreadie).  Fashionable female body types have enjoyed a much shorter shelf life in the twentieth than in the nineteenth century.

 

Garbo's performance was praised by critics.  In the New York Times Mordaunt Hall wrote, “Here she is a Swedish girl to whom life has been anything but kind and who for that reason ... is bitterly cynical....  All this is splendidly acted by Miss Garbo...” (McGregor 89).  Playwright Robert E. Sherwood gushed: “An actor to deserve that most misapplied of all epithets, great,' must possess intelligence, grace and power in high degree.  Miss Garbo is liberally endowed with the three essential qualities....  Her intense power bursts forth for the first time in Anna Christie” (Bainbridge 179).  The intense power Sherwood refers to caught audiences off-guard in Garbo's display of razor-sharp anger when she confronts her father and Mat with male duplicity.  She dominates both men completely as she ladles up the truth of their hypocrisy.

 

But there is another aspect to Garbo's richly textured performance that critics have not noticed: her humor.  An astute spectator did not have to wait for Ninotchka (1939) to appreciate Garbo as comedian and self-parodist.  Like Marilyn Monroe's, her performances are double-coded; one can read them simultaneously as “straight” and as parodies, and parody is at the heart of O'Neill's vision in Anna Christie.  Garbo, who studied acting at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre Drama School (Kronlund 30-32), inherited a nineteenth-century theatrical technique.  Frequently, she projects with conviction a stylized gesture and at the same time mocks it, which is the game O'Neill is playing with nineteenth century stereotypes of female sexuality.  Anna Christie is, among other things, a very funny play, and Garbo, both directly and indirectly, knows how to laugh.

 

O'Neill, incensed that critics imputed that he had pandered to the box office by bringing down the curtain on a cheerful note that did not rise organically from the plot, fretted, and then countered that “the happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten....  Three characters have been revealed in all their intrinsic verity, under the acid test of a fateful crisis in their lives.  They have solved this crisis for the moment as best they may, in accordance with the will that is in each of them.  The curtain falls.  Behind it their lives go on....” (Gelb 435-436, 478-482; please note that the paradigm of dramatic structure O'Neill enunciates here—character revealed through action precipitated by a crisis—follows Aristotle's model in The Poetics, 17, 25-27.)

 

Why critics found O'Neill's ending so happy remains a conundrum.  Anna falls for Mat in a euphoria of romantic infatuation.  She is attracted to Mat precisely because he is the wrong man.  Her greatest fears stem from the early trauma of male abandonment (her father), and she will replay this trauma over and over with Mat.  Mat, a roaming seaman at heart, will not give Anna the emotional solace she needs.  And during his long voyages from home as he whiles away idle hours in the brothels that hug every port, will a woman with Anna's sexual awareness stay happily at home, planting cabbages?  O'Neill's tragic vision informs Anna Christie.  The Mat-Anna union is a recapitulation of the James O'Neill and Ella Quinlan marriage, a couple head over heels in love but destined to torment each other unendingly.  Anyone who knows Long Day's Journey cannot read the end of Anna Christie as happy-ever-after.  Anna, like Mary Tyrone, will be happy “for a time.”  And yet, after showing us all the reasons why Anna and Mat would not marry, O'Neill forces us to give their marriage a benediction.  We want them to be happy, and marriage, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, is the triumph of hope over experience.  Only the greatest tragedians can transcend tragedy (Jaspers 98-101).  From a postmodern perspective, O'Neill's rapid mood swings and mixing of genres are a tour de force.  Genres set up frames of meaning and expectation that guide the reader's interpretive process.  One must read the play within the conventions of both romantic comedy, which ends with a happy union, and naturalistic melodrama, which ends as fate tightens its noose.  The end forces us to look at romantic love with both a sentimental eye and a jaundiced one.

 

One of the most important questions any production must solve, therefore, is how to play the end.  Clarence Brown, a conscientious film director, broadened the broad comedy of the final scene: George F. Marion (Chris) and Charles Bickford (Mat) thump down their beer glasses so hard that foam flies every which way.  Garbo giggles like a school girl and in a theatrical gesture lifts high a glass to toast the sea.  But Brown also suggests O'Neill's darker tones under the high jinks.  As Anna and Mat stare into each other's eyes, the old man walks to the door and stands alone.  Without modulation, the mood changes completely.  Framed by the door, filled with premonitions, he curses the sea one last time: “Fog, fog, fog, all bloody time.  You can't see vhere you vas going, no.  Only dat ole davil, sea—she knows!” (160).  The camera pans out to show a dark, brooding ocean with waves toiling in the wind—a haunting visual metaphor that does not suggest calm seas and smooth sailing.  Through the alchemy of the camera, Brown transmutes O'Neill's theatrical discourse into fluid cinematic poetry (Cooper 73).  Soon a jolly melody, which in Hollywood's repertoire signifies happy ever after, fades in.  The contrast between the menace of the visual image and the jaunty reassurance of the orchestra evokes the grotesque—a calling forth of different and irreconcilable emotions which should make the audience uncomfortable (Fanger 20,157, 228-240; Kayser 116-118).

 

The film falls short, however, with its actors.  Whereas Garbo and Dressler mesmerize—the likes of those two we'll never see again—the men fail to satisfy.  Marion, who was praised for his portrayal of the father in the original Broadway production (1921) and in the silent film (1923), was sixty-one the first time he incarnated Chris (Wainscott 87).  But almost ten years had passed by the second filming, and he relates to Garbo less as father than as grandfather.  Besides being too old and too gentle, he can no longer form an angle in the triangle of sexual jealousy that runs between Mat, Anna and himself.  Consequently, some of the play's more disturbing subtexts evaporate.  Best as a doddering old fool in the comedy routines with Dressler, Marion's scenes with Garbo limp.  His avuncular tenderness is dimwitted and irksome.  In terms of dramatic function, Chris inherits the role of Senex from Roman comedy (in later avatars he is called Pantaloon or Harpagon or Bartolo)—the old man who, driven by lust, blocks the consummation of young love.  What O'Neill does with Anna's father demonstrates how he plays with the traditions he inherits and how he transcends them.  Chris begins as a stereotype, but through the acuity of O'Neill's psychological insights he winds up a richly observed individual.  Marion turns this individual back into a buffoon.

 

Like Marion, Bickford's talent lies in comedy.  But Mat must generate erotic sparks with Anna, and Bickford needs his sexual batteries recharged.  Never have Garbo's love scenes seemed so pointless.  But a woman can't do it alone, and if the man Garbo is seducing looks as if he'd rather be outside kicking footballs, it's not her problem.  But Bickford is a wonderful lunk of a clown, and the movie extracts every last laugh from O'Neill's play.

 

Garbo considered the German-speaking version, which she made for M-G-M with different actors for export, infinitely superior to the American version (Hans Junkermann played Mat; Theo Schall, Chris; and Salka Viertel, Marthy).  She left a screening of the English version midway with only one comment: “Isn't it terrible?”  Her admiration for Dressler, however, expressed itself in a rare tribute from the reclusive star.  She drove personally to Dressler's home to present the veteran comedienne with flowers (Bainbridge 179; Walker 109).

 

Like O'Neill, scholars and critics have denigrated Anna Christie.  Virginia Floyd dubbed it “a play gone wrong” (192).  Frederic Carpenter complained that it “suffers from obvious faults....  Written by fits and starts, it lacked unity” (Carpenter 91).  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.”

 

Despite the low esteem in which critics have held the play, it has received many major revivals, largely because the title role appeals to strong-willed actresses.  The play, after all, makes a proto-feminist statement and debunks the myths that cloak male egotism.  Pauline Lord starred in the original production at the Vanderbilt Theatre on Broadway, which went on to London and enthusiastic acclaim by British critics; Busby Berkeley directed a 1925 revival in Albany; Jessie Royce Landis starred in a 1936 revival in Maine; Ingrid Bergman in 1941 in California; Celeste Holm in 1952 at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway; Carroll Baker and Salome Jens in productions in the 60s.  A production in Chicago in 1988 garnered raves in the local press.  A silent film with Blanche Sweet appeared in 1923.  In the 40's Dorothy McGuire (Anna), Burgess Meredith (Mat) and Oscar Homolka (Chris) broadcast the play on radio, and June Havoc performed it for television in the 50s.  The musical version, New Girl in Town (1957), had a book by George Abbott, songs by Bob Merrill, and featured Gwen Verdon.

 

I have seen two major productions, both on Broadway, the first directed by José Quintero at the Imperial Theater in 1977, the second by David Leveaux at the Roundabout Theatre in 1993.  The interest of the 1977 production centered on Liv Ullmann, who had triumphed in Ibsen's Doll's House at Lincoln Center in 1975.  Quintero had directed her in Moon for the Misbegotten in Norway in 1976 and suggested the play to her (McDonough 189).  Given the reputations of both star and director, expectations were riding high, but the production received mixed reviews.  Clurman called it “ordinary” and “external.”  Simon found Quintero's direction lacking in “ingenuity,” and Kalem wrote that the director was like “a Boy Scout trying to strike fire by rubbing one stick.”  Clive Barnes didn't see the signature of a director at all: “Quintero appears to have directed with a light hand, leaving the actors much to themselves.”  Walter Kerr characterized Quintero's direction as “fidgety” and pronounced the production “misguided” (Kerr 36).

 

Although many reviewers treated Ullmann with kid gloves—Ingmar Bergman's films had turned her into a cherished icon of Existential angst—her performance as Anna began to raise doubts about her ability to act in live theatre.  Gill wrote that “she fails to command a stage.”  Simon confessed sadly, ”she does not glow as she does on screen.”  Clurman waxed caustic: “She does not express the quintessential Anna....  Anna's sickness is the ache of a soul, an unromantic existential pain which is exemplary and not only due to the accident of present circumstances.  Ullmann, whatever her immediate ailment and trouble, strikes one as healthy at the core.” (Clurman did not understand that Existentialism is the twentieth century's version of Romanticism, our mal-de-siècle.)  Other critics had kinder words for the actress.

 

I found Ullmann's performance better than the reviewers quoted.  She brought a wide-eyed, child-like bewilderment to the part.  The egotism and stupidity of men stumped her.  Entering the waterfront saloon, tricked out in a brown velvet jacket three sizes too big and a gaudy hat with limp, fluttering feather, she looked like a little girl who had just raided grandma's trunk in the attic.  She shouldn't be wearing makeup and high heels.  Fishing desperately in her handbag for cigarettes, ordering whiskey in a broken rasp of a voice, Ullmann seasoned this innocence with a perverse sensuality that gave her Anna the ambiguity it needs.  Ullmann's explosion of anger as she rubbed the double standard in the faces of her father and suitor had a fierce dignity that stung.  And in the quiet opening of Act Four, as Anna waits alone for her fate to be sealed, Ullmann filled the theatre with all the Existential dread we associate with her.

 

Miscasting the male parts, however, sapped the energy of Ullmann's performance and Quintero's production, as it had Garbo's film.  Neither Garbo nor Ullmann had worthy opponents to play off.  The power of O'Neill's play depends on the heat the relationship of three people at sexual cross purposes can generate.  The question it poses—how do men deal with or refuse to deal with female sexuality—does not come into focus unless the three actors can create a climate of danger.  As in the film, Anna's male antagonists were milksops, too gentle to bring out the dark undertow of O'Neill's descent into forbidden territory.  John Lithgow, usually a superb actor, repressed the brutal aspects of Mat's personality, and, as for romance, he generated all the sex appeal of a castrato.  O'Neill did not write the part for an altar boy.

 

Quintero, taking a strong position that undercut the illusion of “happily ever after,” brought the curtain down with a brilliant coup de théâtre.  The set for the last three acts was a large, symbolic barge (designed by Ben Edwards).  This vast space enabled Quintero, after the ritual toast and Chris's final musings on the sea, to separate the three characters, isolating them in different spots on the stage as each pondered silently and alone the strange, eventful history they had just enacted.  Thus Quintero's production ended, not on a joyous note of reconciliation, but in the penumbra of alienation.  (For photographs of the production see McDonough and Outerbridge.)

 

The Roundabout's revival in 1993 with Natasha Richardson as Anna, Liam Neeson as Mat, and Rip Torn as Chris opened to favorable reviews.  Its power, in fact, forced John Simon to concede that the play might have some merit: “Even in this outmoded, often foolish and clunky play, there lies, buried full fathom five, a genuine human predicament, a set of conflicts that—if you disregard the wrinkles in the plot, the kinks in the verbiage, and the creaks in the values it portrays (but does not espouse!)—still manages to summon up some St. Elmo's fire” (Simon 1993).  And Jack Kroll, who had earlier dismissed the piece as a “heaving, hooting scow of a play,” scrambled to find more positive adjectives, calling it “solid oak, part of the furniture of the American theatre” (Kroll 1977; 1933).  I cite these tergiversations only to demonstrate how a successful theatrical experience can graphically alter a critic's assessment of a work, proving again that the best way to measure a play is in the theatre.

 

Like Garbo and Ullmann, Natasha Richardson was successful in projecting the contradictory traditions embodied in Anna.  During the course of the play she modulated her voice from a gin-sodden growl to a soft, plangent murmur and her appearance from a blowzy, hard-bitten hooker to an all-knowing, all-forgiving madonna.  In Act One, dressed in a red blouse that alluded visually to Garbo's, she fiddled with her black bra straps as she shoveled more makeup onto a grotesquely over-madeup face.  Tossing cigarette butts on the floor, she stomped them out with all the displaced rage she feels toward men.  She confided to Marthy, “It was one of the sons...[long pause] the youngest...[long pause] started me...[long pause] when I was sixteen...[very long pause].  After that I hated them all” (79).  And as she did so her voice took on an unearthly quality.  Uninflected, it showed no emotion; but in those long pauses, her repressed anger and grief spoke eloquently.  At first her meeting with Chris was  solemn, but  when he offered  her a  glass of port to celebrate, a deep, throaty laugh rumbled up from her stomach, a laugh that conveyed all the absurdity she sees at the core of life.  As she said “Skoal! Guess I know that word, all right!” (87), her voice became low and deep and bitter.

 

In her confrontation with Mat and Chris in Act Three, anger and remorse struggled for the upper hand.  When she confessed her love to Mat—“That was why I got stuck on you....  Will you believe it if I tell you that loving you has made me—clean?” (134-135)—her anger melted into a verbal caress, and the depth of Richardson's tenderness filled her lines with a conviction that forced the hardest-boiled cynic to believe.  Tenderness and sorrow were the characteristics that set Richardson's Anna apart.  Under her anger, one sensed an awareness of the fragility of happiness, the fragility of life.  But rather than giving in to despair, she turned toward the world with a shy embrace to protect herself and others from the maelstrom that awaits them and that she foresees.  When in Act Four, overcome by his longing, Mat collapsed in her lap, weeping, Richardson cuddled him like the little boy he is.

 

But little boy is only one part of Mat Burke, and the revelation of the evening was Liam Neeson, who unearthed more complexity in Anna's swain than anyone had ever dreamed existed.  In the trade, Anna Christie is known as an actress's play.  Neeson demonstrated that an actor can take possession of it as well.  Bickford and Lithgow had portrayed Mat as a vaudeville Irishman.  Neeson could do this turn, only he did it better.  When he spoke O'Neill's lines with an Irish lilt, Mat's language sang with a poetry no one had ever heard there before.  But Neeson moved beyond stereotype to limn the portrait of a man possessed by devils and searching for salvation.

 

Neeson and Richardson played off each other beautifully.  She tends to be an interior, contemplative actress with small, almost introverted gestures.  Neeson is big, in every sense of the word.  Much more physical than Richardson, he fills the stage with the hulk of his body and the boom of his voice.  Richardson forces the spectator to come to her in quiet meditation; Neeson grabs him by the jugular.  Arguing with Chris in Act Three, Neeson banged the table, jumped on it, balanced himself on the edge and shouted his opponent down.  When Chris pulled a knife, he slopped the old man against the wall like a bucket of bilge water.  When Anna hurled the truth in his face, he keeled over and moaned as if a maniacal mule had suddenly kicked him in the stomach.  When the sea belched him up—flesh glistening with oil and sweat—he was a force of nature whom Richardson was powerless to resist.  At last a production understood that Anna Christie is about sex, and Neeson and Richardson blazed with all the desire, anger, violence and tenderness that we, for want of a better word, call love.  What made their duo so dynamic was body language: how she struck his chest each time she said “I hated them” (the men she'd sold herself to; 153), how he caressed her hand as he gave her his mother's cross, or how he rubbed his forehead with her hand.  And the audience heaved a collective sigh as, kissing Richardson passionately, Neeson made love to her on the table.  Richardson and Neeson are erotic because of the way they touch each other.  Clearly, the chemistry was right.  “He's sexy in the truest sense of the word,” Richardson said of her co-star.  “He has raw and open sexuality.  It's not contrived.  It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy.  It comes from somewhere deeper than that” (Kantrowitz 62).

 

And Neeson was not afraid to explore the darker aspects of Mat, the sanctimonious bully who automatically turns to alcohol and violence to solve life's problems.  When Neeson lifted the chair over Anna's head, we expected it to come crashing down on her.  When he threatened to murder her, his voice thundered with such blood lust that anyone who didn't know the play would expect it to end with a corpse on the floor.  But hiding just below this bluster, Neeson suggested vulnerability.  Brutes are a dime a dozen, but why has there been only one great Stanley Kowalski?  Because underneath Brando's swagger, one sensed the touch of a poet.  Similarly, the power of Neeson's performance came from the sensitivity under the strut.  When he accepted Anna for the complex woman she is and folded her gently into his arms, we realized that it is he, not just Anna, who is redeemed by love—O'Neill's final ironic spin on the Camille story.  Just maybe, Anna will turn this hairy ape into a human being.

 

Director David Leveaux came up with a haunting tableau to close the play, not on a pessimistic note like Quintero's, but on an ambiguous one.  After Chris's final imprecation, the back wall split open, and banks of fog rolled in, swirling around the actors like a pall.  Anna turned away from Mat and, with her back to the audience, stared off into the distance of a beautifully lit grey and violet horizon.  As she turned from him, Mat continued to hold her wrist tenderly, head bowed as if in prayer.  When the lights dimmed, their silhouettes were together and yet apart.  One could read this ending as sad but also as quietly, tenaciously, sagely—resquiescat O'Neill—happy.  Throughout the production, body language waxed eloquent, and in the end, Mat's dogged love for Anna expressed itself in a gesture that spoke louder than words within John Lee Beatty's spare set and beneath Marc Weiss's magical lights.

 

Any performance is a confluence of contingencies.  Performance breathes in the margins of a text, and all one can say in conclusion is that theatre artists have served Anna Christie better than critics have.  The former have led the way in helping us appreciate this masterful play and in showing us how to deal with its problematic denouement.  Theatre exists  in a space of representation other than the literary; its sets in motion many different semiotic systems of which the verbal is only one (Elam).  A performance is an interpretive gambit, a play of meaning in which signifiers outside the text set up a dialogue with signifiers inside the text (Holmberg 1986).  These signifiers cross and clash and collide.  And in their collisions theatre lives.

 

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