Liv in Limbo

By T.E. Kalem

ANNA CHRISTIE

by EUGENE O'NEILL

When an ethereal beauty named Julie Haydon played the role of a prostitute in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, most of the critics lambasted the producer for a casting blooper. Critic John Mason Brown noted that his colleagues seemed singularly omniscient in knowing precisely how a prostitute should look. The luminous and lovely Liv Ullmann is no one's image of a prostitute either. But Anna Christie is such a cheap, cosmetic come-on of a drama as to vie with any streetwalker.

Eugene O'Neill is a prime example of the roller-coaster ride of reputation. After his popular vogue in the '20s he went into two decades of neglect. Restored to critical approval and public favor in the mid-'50s, he began to mount an Everest of esteem which most of his plays cannot remotely scale. What is wrong with Anna Christie? Just about everything. With the daintiness of a dinosaur, the play, first produced in 1921, wallows in the goo of sentimentality, quavers with the palsy of moral priggishness, and resolves itself in a bogus happy ending that, at its best, releases the playgoer from Broadway's Imperial Theater.

Consider the plot. The girl Anna (Ullmann), casually abandoned by her drink-sodden seagoing father (Robert Donley), is seduced by a teen-age lout. Via instant replay she becomes a whore. Ill (the wages of sin), she returns to her father's barge. There she meets the Irish stoker Mat Burke, who is played by John Lithgow like a brain-numbed victim of killer bees. Naturally, these two crippled creatures fall in love. Anna confesses her past. Since Mat is a pre-ecumenical Roman Catholic, he is appalled that he has fallen for an unclean woman. But she tells him that true love has washed away her sins and the pure and simple stupe embraces her.

Ullmann achieves the alchemy of a fine actress with this dross. Under her magnetic touch, her commanding presence, her lustrous eyes, the base metal of O'Neill's drudgery seems, at times, to glisten. She is aided by the direction of Jose Quintero, who has a hand-in-glove affinity with all the works of O'Neill. Unfortunately, in this particular instance he is reduced to the condition of a Boy Scout trying to strike fire by rubbing one stick. T.E. Kalem

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