The sea, in the plays of Eugene O’Neill, is never neutral: It is fate, peril, self-delusion, rebirth, truth. How fitting, then, that it is on a New York waterfront that I meet Michelle Williams, the star of a new production of Anna Christie that begins performances November 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (opening night is December 11). We’re in a vast photo studio overlooking the Gowanus Canal, a place of coarse beauty and a setting that uncannily echoes the play’s watery, shrouded world: a rotgut saloon along the East River and a coal barge anchored in harbors in Provincetown and Boston—liminal spaces of fog, tides, grit.

Williams settles onto a sofa—poised, sincere, thoughtful—as barges, silos, and cranes loom through the enormous studio windows. One of the most versatile and

See Full Page