“Anna Christie”

With a mission to share “meaningful stories for the community while developing a culture of professional artists,” the Firebox Theatre Company has been producing plays since September 2022 in an adapted performance space in the Downtown Wake Forest Historic District. The venue is on the second floor of a former cotton warehouse, an infill building constructed between two existing structures, with exposed brick walls still bearing traces of earlier painted lettering. A small thrust theater, with sixty-five to seventy seats, has been configured within the larger room. A portable wooden dance floor between four permanent wooden columns defined the main acting area for this revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.”A simple but effective scenic design by Kristin Obman recycled elements from one act to the next. Two crates served as tables in Johnny-the-Priest’s saloon with four smaller crates as seats. The crates also looked appropriate on the barge, with the two larger ones pushed together on their sides to create a single bunk inside the cabin. A small platform just upstage of the main performance space held an unfinished wood bar and a doorframe. During the set change from act 1, bottles were removed and a multipaned window and section of wall placed on top of the bar to create the exterior of the barge cabin. During the production’s single intermission between acts 2 and 3, the window and wall pieces were reversed and the door frame moved to the opposite side of the unit to help establish the cabin interior.Because the venue does not allow for the masking of all offstage areas, actors remained in character for lengthy exits and entrances around the perimeter of the main performance space. Director Zachary Roberts occasionally employed the peripheral space for some action. For example, though only one room of the saloon was represented onstage, when Marthy needs to intercept Chris, lights were brought up on a small space next to the center seats to convey a sense of a private conversation taking place in a separate room out of Anna’s earshot.The atmosphere was enhanced with lively piano music during the preshow and scene changes, evoking the early twentieth century in the sound design by Tim Artz. The storytelling was also supported through the costume design by Brenda Holden and Cora Hemphill, with contemporary clothing pieces selected to suggest an earlier era. Though all the design elements—including a single instance of stage fog—were well managed, the real reason to see this company perform is not for spectacle but for the compelling performances in this classic American drama.The first of the main characters we encountered was the old barge captain, Chris Christopherson, played with lively assurance by Michael Foley. Initially Foley highlighted the character’s jolly exterior as he tossed money on the bar and drunkenly sang “My Yosephine.” Other layers of the character were soon revealed as Foley portrayed a man haunted by past failures and tragedies. He nervously embraced the opportunity to rebuild his relationship with the daughter he had more or less abandoned years before. He revealed his superstitious nature when he admonished Anna not to marry a sailor, or even worse a stoker, and reflexively warned of “dat ole davil sea.”Hilary Edwards held her own in the title role. She displayed a persona that was easily read as respectable by Chris and Mat. However, the audience could also see that Anna was troubled when Mat described her as a “fine, dacent girl.” As the play progressed, we saw Anna, cleansed and rejuvenated by her stay on the barge, longing to make a fresh start yet mistrusting the possibility. Although Anna’s experience had taught her to hate men, she began to fall in love with Mat, even as a marriage seemed impossible. Edwards skillfully handled the emotional complexity of Anna’s situation, demonstrating her command of the role most compellingly during act 3’s powerful revelation of the depths of Anna’s life experience.One minor departure from O’Neill’s text was a reference to Anna’s age as twenty-five (rather than twenty) and Chris having not seen his daughter for twenty years. This may have been to accommodate the age of Edwards in the role of Anna but was more likely a nod to the age of the actor playing Mat Burke. One of the Firebox Theatre’s two cofounders, Tim Artz, performed the role of Mat, and while Artz is a talented actor who proved to be adept at the role, he also appeared to be a couple decades older than the Irishman of “about thirty” in O’Neill’s stage directions. Presumably, the adjustment of Anna’s age was an acknowledgment of contemporary sensibilities about a twenty-year-old being too young to be paired with an older man. Artz brought the necessary vigor and passion to the role, with convincing distress at the revelation of Anna’s past. In act 4, Artz rose to the challenge of embodying a man torn between his hopes and doubts. And, throughout, Artz sounded completely natural speaking in an Irish accent, as Foley did with a Swedish one, to the credit of dialect coach Danica Jackson.Also worth noting was the performance by Angela Skinner as Marthy. Though not appearing as worn and battered by life as suggested by O’Neill’s character description, her Marthy added a hint of poignancy to the story with an effort to maintain a cheery facade over a world-weary core. She shrewdly assessed her situation and, rather than making a scene, cleared out before being asked. The moment of mutual recognition between Marthy and Anna offered the audience a hint of one possible, less than appealing, future for the younger woman.One assumes the strong performances by the leading actors, supported by Collins Wilson, Kent Joseph, Mike Southern, and Steven Burtoft in smaller roles, were developed in collaboration with the director. Certainly, Roberts created clear stage pictures that helped convey the story. He also used simple, motivated movement by individual characters, repositioning a crate here or there, to vary the playing space within a given act. The final moments of the play were staged in a manner that emphasized the ambiguity of O’Neill’s happy ending, with tragedy averted and lovers united, but happily-ever-after not guaranteed. Christopherson dominated the picture, brooding on the fog at the window upstage center, while Mat, seated in a downstage corner, leaned his head against Anna’s waist. It was an ending that was decidedly more somber than celebratory, though the effect was somewhat undercut by cheerful music when the performers took their bows.As the lights came up, a woman seated behind me commented that she was disappointed with the ending because she did not want Anna and Mat to end up together. Her companion noted that this was a century-old play. They seemed unaware that a mixed critical response to this play’s ending dates back to its original production. However, neither those women nor other audience members appeared unhappy to have spent the previous two hours engaging with “Anna Christie.” With this production, Firebox Theatre fulfilled its mission of sharing meaningful stories, in this case an O’Neill play whose characters still resonated with an audience more than hundred years after first appearing on stage.