Summary
A young woman with a troubled past seeks sanctuary with her estranged father, whom she hasn’t seen since childhood.
Friday, December 12, 2025 at 7:30 PM Dec 12, 2025, 7:30 PM
The rumor mill has been pretty negative for this, but I would say I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe I shouldn’t have been? What you’re looking at here is one of those classic old plays (1921!) with a prestige cast, creative team and budget, without overzealous updates to the material; in theory, the floor ought to be pretty high. (Evidently they had technical issues in early previews.)
Performance quality is as strong as the names would suggest; Brian d’Arcy James and Michelle Williams make a fabulous father-daughter pairing, the former bringing his beard with him from Eurydice and the latter her sharp, chameleonic presence from, well, everything. Tom Sturridge rounds out the top three bringing a lot (a LOT) of physicality, crawling all over the stage and slamming his body on things and stabbing knives into blocks of wood and all the things that intense, drunken sailors ought to do. Everybody is doing really committed accents and dialects. It’s a pretty good way to get to know the text for the first time, situating it in time and place, and in general I thought this was a worthwhile play to examine in 2025, when cultural impressions of the dignity of sex work are shifting. Anna asserts herself in a way that feels genuine, human, and not like corporate GRLPWR, and more of that is certainly welcome.
I did find that everything is layered on a little thick to a degree that can sometimes be distracting. The accents are very heavy. Tom is crawling around a LOT (A LOT). Brian smashes a bottle on the brick wall so vigorously that it feels like a safety hazard. Thomas Kail’s staging, constructed of wooden pallets and rearranged by the cast between scenes, can especially feel a little overmanaged at points. In one case there are two ~consecutive scenes in the same location and they rotate the whole thing 180 degrees, which I interpreted after-the-fact as “we’re supposed to see things from a different angle now” but was disoriented in the moment. (But, then, sometimes it did work for me—I like how Anna is physically elevated over the course of the show as she grows in self-respect.)