“By Jiminy,” where are they all supposed to be from?
The 1930 movie adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna Christie, was famed for featuring silent movie icon Greta Garbo’s first-ever spoken line on film. “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby,” her title character says, a moment so totemic that it was marketed with the tagline: “Garbo Talks!”
In the all-star revival of O’Neill’s 1921 play currently at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (to Feb. 1, 2026)—with a wow-looking cast of Michelle Williams in the title role, Tom Sturridge, Brian d’Arcy James, and Mare Winningham—the human voice is again notable, though not as positively. This production contains the most baffling accents or accent choices on the New York stage, and the untethered polyphony hobbles the drama. It’s hard to immerse oneself in theatrical lusty passion and parental estrangement when the voices speaking the lines sound so (literally) all over the place.
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