Anna Christie is seventy-two now; Anna Christopherson herself would be ninety-two. And why not? All that salty sea air could have been an ideal preservative. The play won Eugene O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize in 1921 and may be said to have begun serious American theater. Its large simplicities of theme and construction are well known: a prodigal daughter returns to her father’s barge and strives, with some success, to exorcise her own and her father’s past. Of course, it was not Anna who had been prodigal, but her parents, who had farmed her out to cousins in Minnesota. There, as she tells her father, one of them “that you think such nice people—the youngest son—Paul . . . started me wrong. It was none of my fault.” Raped thus at sixteen, she went to Saint Paul and worked as a nurse until the breaks drove her to “a house.” She hates men—“every mother’s son of ’em.”

The exciting new production of Anna Christie at the Roundabout seizes on what is living in the play—the drive of the central pair, Anna and her brutish Irish stoker, Mat, toward redemption—and downplays what is dated—the sodden maunderings of Anna’s father, Chris Christopherson, about sea and fog. This amounts to a revaluation of the play. Anna Christie evolved from a “sea play” called Chris Christopherson that concentrated upon the seadog father, a character O’Neill knew and doted on from his days of frequenting waterfront bars in New York. There isa daughter