Revving Into Revelation

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: ANNA CHRISTIE

AUTHOR: EUGENE O'NEILL

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Natasha Richardson stars in a revival of the waterfront drama that finally finds its sea legs.

THE REPUTATION OF EUGENE O'Neill occupies the American stage the way your grandparents' sofa might dominate your living room. The thing is dark, overstuffed, too big and too long. Its style affronts modern taste; it has an odor that lingers somewhere between musty and musk. Yet you're afraid to toss the thing out because you've been told it's a valuable antique. And some people do say they feel comfortable sitting on it.

The people are actors; they find great scenes between the cushions of O'Neill's rhetoric. This is why dramas like Anna Christie -- ponderous artifacts stocked with sullen, logorrheic characters -- are so often revived, with such imposing casts. Jason Robards has long fanned the flame on Broadway, / and London has seen many winning revivals: the Glenda Jackson Strange Interlude, Desire Under the Elms with Colin Firth and Carmen Du Sautoy, A Touch of the Poet with Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave. Actors love digging to the core of a role, no matter how long it takes; and O'Neill's plays, which idle in dour exposition before revving into revelation, let them reproduce that effort every night. For playgoers, the appeal is simpler. Once O'Neill warms up his characters -- lets them loose after a few hours of hemming and thawing -- he can dish out terrific soap opera.

Anna Christie has just that simmer and boil. A waterfront fable about a Swedish whore with a heart of gold, this 1921 sea wheeze contains a corrosive third-act face-off that helped O'Neill win the second of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Yet the play was criticized so widely for its optimistic ending -- unthinkable in high drama, where everyone must suffer, especially the audience -- that O'Neill felt obliged to declare he was misunderstood. In fact, he had been found out: without the scaffolding of tragedy, his stagecraft was exposed as ramshackle, his creatures as puppets. Though producers drag Anna Christie out of the closet every decade or so (for Ingrid Bergman, Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann), they can't shake the mothballs from it. "Isn't it terrible?" said Greta Garbo, who toiled nobly in a 1930 film version. "Who ever saw Swedes act like that?"

Perhaps Natasha Richardson, the gifted British actress who stars in David Leveaux's sturdy Broadway revival, figured that the play might not be terrible if Anna weren't quite so Swedish. She jettisons the immigrant inflections for a flat Minnesota accent. More helpfully, she makes Anna a fighter, battered on the wheel of men's lust but still defiantly erect. The actors' posture is important here. As Anna's negligent father, Rip Torn walks with the cramped stride of a man who stays upright by lying to himself -- even as Torn remains true to the text by speaking in the obscure diction of the Muppets' Swedish Chef. And Liam Neeson, wonderfully direct as Anna's would-be redeemer of a beau, lurches from anger to perplexity. He is like a backward child with an oversize soul.

At its heart, Anna Christie is about parents and children. O'Neill's actor father James died a few months before the play was written, and in it you can see Eugene -- the tramp poet in a fog, the son who ran away to sea -- raging at a dying generation's prejudices before reconciling himself to the people who hold them. In a subtler way, Richardson has donned the mantle of her incandescent mother, Vanessa Redgrave. By evening's end, the young star has settled onto the old O'Neill sofa. Why, they might have been made for each other!