One of my college roommates, knowing of my love of conceptual art and lists,  suggested that each year I read and review books that were published 100 years ago.  When I found a web site that listed books and plays published in 1922, I found a rich trove of well-known works by famous authors.  Among them was this play, albeit first performed in 1920, but for which O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.  It was his first among four Pulitzers, and he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1937.  He is considered along with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the three greatest American playwrights of the 20th C.

‘Anna Christie’ is a tragic story featuring three characters in a non-traditional love triangle—Chris Christopherson, the captain of a coal barge and a Swedish immigrant, his daughter Anna, newly arrived in New York from St. Paul, and Mat Burke, an Irish stoker who nearly drowns after his ship breaks up in a storm. When Burke manages to reach the coal barge, the triangle is in place and the action gets fast and furious.  Anna has not seen her father for 15 years when her mother died and he left her with relatives on a Minnesota farm. She has fallen into a life of prostitution and finally turns to her father for help.  Chris is a drunken, heart-broken seaman who is both guilt-ridden and thrilled by the reappearance of his daughter, but he turns bitter and hateful when she falls in love with the violent and angry Burke.  The brutality of the lives of the underclass and harsh language occupy the four acts, but a strange, happy ending concludes this award-winning play.

One hundred years has not been kind to this work, written at a time when the theater was only beginning to deal with real people and their disillusioned and unhappy lives.  O’Neill was only 32 when he wrote this work, largely in Provincetown where he was the founder of a significant arts scene in the 20’s.  His life was one of multiple marriages and tragic outcomes for his children. Two of his sons committed suicide after struggling with alcoholism, and he disowned his daughter, Oona, when she married the 54 year old Charlie Chaplin at the age of 18. I look forward to reading O’Neill’s later works which have enjoyed a recent revival on Broadway. ‘The Iceman Cometh’ and ‘Long Days Journey into Night’ have recently been performed including locally at the ART. The latter is his autobiographical drama published after he died in Boston in 1953 in a hotel which is now a BU dorm.