#theater-revival

#theater-revival

When the play that would become Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie opened in 1920, it was named not for the woman that would expand to fill its center but for her father. Chris Christopherson (no relation to the singer) stumbled onto the stage in Atlantic City after a tumultuous rehearsal process for which O'Neill was largely absent, its director desperately hacking minutes out of the script and slashing the title to simply Chris while he was at it. Whatever happened in Chris, O'Neill wasn't having it. By the next year he had rewritten the play from the bottom up, refocusing its spotlight on a character who had begun as little more than a prim cipher, carving away at her marble till he revealed a heroine.

You're bang-on, lady, and in more ways than one. Neither the play nor Scott Ellis's yuks-forward revival starring Bobby Cannavale, Neil Patrick Harris, and James Corden really has much to do with the subject of its title. Reza herself knew as much: Though the new Broadway artwork does away with them, there's a contemptuous little pair of air quotes in the show's name as written.