Anna Christie

"It ain't your fault and it ain't mine and it ain't his neither. We're all poor nuts and things happen…”



Anna Christie is the tragedy of a young prostitute who falls in love and dreams of starting a new life. 


When his wife dies, an old Swedish sailor, Chris Christopherson, packs his little daughter Anna off to some farmer cousins in Minnesota, so that she may grow up away from the sea. 


Anna grows up into a lonely and bitter woman, and it is from a raided brothel in St. Paul, sick and disconsolate, that she finally comes east to reunite with her estranged father and travel with him on his barge. 


On board the Simeon Winthrop she meets Mat Burke and falls in love with him. 


Her father does not approve of the union. But Anna is up against a lot more than just disapproval once she tells her father and her lover about her past.


Anna Christie is clearly informed by the personal experiences of a life spent on Manhattan’s South Street Seaport area. As a young man, Eugene O’Neill was a seaman and aggressive boozer who spent much of his time in dives and flophouses along New York City’s waterfront. 




EUGENE O’NEILL (1888–1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His plays The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day's Journey into Night are included on the short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century. Anna Christie won Eugene O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize.


“Because it is crowded with life, because it has sprung from as fine an imagination as ever worked in our theatre, and because it has been wrought by a master of dramatic dialogue, [Anna Christie] is worth seeing again and again…”


-New York Times