Very few playwrights have had Eugene O'Neill's talent for slicing through surface emotions to the raw stuff beneath. That is why Anna Chris- tie, now in an absorbing revival at the Focus, still packs such a punch. First produced in 1920, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, it displays today some naive and romantic excesses; but the power of its pyschological probings drills through them to dramatic bedrock.
Anna, from the age of five with her mother dead and her Swedish father a stranger at sea, is brought up by relations in Minnesota. At 16 she is sexually abused by a cousin and is driven to prostitution. A few years later, after a spell in prison, she comes to meet her father Chris, in New York. He is now captain on a coal barge, and takes her with him. But one night survivors from a shipwreck come on board, and one of them, a macho Irish stoker named Mat, sees Anna as a ministering angel and falls for her. She feels for him, too, but Chris is bitterly opposed to their relationship. Torn between them, she reveals her past, provoking typical male reactions. But the plot has a few twists left before it ends in a disarming defiance of probability.
Limited run; booking: 01- 6763071/6607109