Old Play in Manhattan

Anna Christie (by Eugene O'Neill) seems to stumble after 30 years. It opens well, with one of O'Neill's sharpest first acts, but it is not one of his good plays. Nor, even though it is due to move from the City Center to Broadway, is the present production any help: it stresses both the play's age and the playwright's streaks of adolescence.

Seldom was O'Neill more vividly theater-minded than at the start of Anna, where his bleary old barge captain excitedly awaits the daughter he hasn't seen since her childhood; and Anna slouches in at last, a tired tramp. But having beautifully set the table, O'Neill brings on chunks of the crudest realistic black bread, cups of the rawest romantic wine. After father meets daughter, Boy--in a sense--Meets Girl. Loving a wild Irish stoker. Anna must alienate him by confessing her past. But there is, if no assurance of happiness, at least a rather muddled happy ending.

In the last two acts, Anna's past and present move at conflicting levels. Hence, after windy, uninspired love passages, O'Neill keeps writing harsh scenes that the play itself does not seem ready for. Anna is as much betrayed by the story as by Life. Both her washed-up father, cursing dat ole davil sea as a way of exonerating himself, and her lover, who should either be less Irish or more poetic, are hollow men who precipitate farce and even bathos.

Art Smith and Kevin McCarthy merely bang away at the two male roles. And Celeste Holm--a fine comedienne who is miscast--quietly fails in the role to which Pauline Lord, in 1921, tremulously brought something of the tragic sense of life.

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