“Anna Christie”
Reviewed by Dan Berkowitz
January 26, 2015
A student once asked playwright and teacher William McCleery why dramatists were called playwrights and not playwrites. “Because plays are not written,” he replied, “they’re wrought.” He paused, then murmured, “Sometimes overwrought.” Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, now at the Odyssey, serves up a double whammy: an overexcited melodrama suffering through an over-the-top production. This story of seafaring folk traps us in a perfect storm of whiny and unsympathetic characters, prolix writing, major overacting, and strange, incongruous, and sometimes simply annoying production elements.