Stage Review

ANNA CHRISTIE

Play by Eugene O’Neill. Adapted and directed by Scott Edmiston. Presented by Lyric Stage Company of Boston, through May 6. Tickets: From $25, 617-585-5678, www.lyricstage.com

When “Anna Christie’’ premiered on Broadway in 1921, Eugene O’Neill was barely into his 30s but already credited with making the American theater safe for serious drama, and on a roll that would make history.

Having won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1920 for “Beyond the Horizon,’’ O’Neill would win it again in 1922 for “Anna Christie,’’ and a third time in 1928, for “Strange Interlude.’’

But for all the laurels flung his way, O’Neill was not then at the height of his powers. That came later, when he created “The Iceman Cometh’’ and especially “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’’ his still-shattering masterwork (which won a fourth Pulitzer in 1957, four years after the playwright’s death.) In those plays, O’Neill’s artistry finally matched the scope of his harrowingly bleak and tragic vision.

By contrast, most of his early work has not aged well. That includes “Anna Christie,’’ which is now at Lyric Stage Company of Boston, adapted and directed by Scott Edmiston.

Even though Edmiston directly tackles O’Neill’s notorious prolixity by eliminating several characters and distilling the play to its core conflicts, he can’t transcend the melodramatic trappings, simplistic psychology, and hard-to-swallow ending that make “Anna Christie’’ such a creaky vehicle. The first half of the Lyric Stage production unfolds at a damagingly sluggish pace, though its pulse does quicken in the second half.

Edmiston has set this “Anna Christie’’ in 1921, with a scenic design (by Janie E. Howland) whose abundance of wooden slats manages to suggest both land and nautical locations as the action moves from a New York saloon to a coal barge in the harbor at Provincetown to the cabin of another coal barge in Boston.

The play is built on the emotionally charged reunion between aging barge captain Chris Christopherson (Johnny Lee Davenport) and his daughter Anna (Lindsey McWhorter), whom he has not seen for 20 years.

Anna is bitter at her father because he left her as a child with cousins of his late wife, who forced her into nonstop toil on their farm. Raped by one of the sons when she was 15, Anna headed out on her own and spent several years as a nurse’s aide. Then she wound up working for two years as a prostitute in a brothel — a part of her past that she at first conceals from both her father and from Mat Burke (Dan Whelton), an Irish stoker who falls in love with her.

Chris’s dream for Anna, he informs a bartender played by James R. Milord, is that “some day she’ll marry a good, steady land fella here in the East, have a home all her own, have kids . . .’’ So Chris is hostile to the idea of his daughter’s involvement with a seafaring man, especially a stoker whose job involves “shoveling coal with the dirtiest, rough gang of no-good fellas.’’ He tells Anna it “ain’t right’’ for her to be with Mat. (The fact that Chris and Anna are played by African-American actors at Lyric Stage and Mat is played by a white actor lends a racial subtext to the exchange between disapproving father and rebellious daughter.)

Chris is prone to doleful and increasingly risible imprecations against “that old devil sea,’’ a stand-in for what the barge captain clearly sees as the inscrutably deterministic and unfair workings of fate. Davenport’s Chris has the soul-battered weariness of a man who perhaps has internalized the fog in which he’s lived for so long, but there’s also something uncharacteristically tentative around the edges of Davenport’s performance, as if this fine actor is still searching for the center of his character.

Whelton is thoroughly persuasive as the strapping, impulsive Mat. While she disappears too soon, Nancy E. Carroll is an asset as Marthy, Chris’s crusty live-in companion.

McWhorter plays Anna with a subdued affect — at times too subdued — in the early going, as if intent on reminding us how much Anna has been knocked around by life. It may be that adapter-director Edmiston wants us to consider parallels between Anna’s mistreatment by men and the stories of abuse generated by the current #MeToo movement. In any case, when the time comes for Anna to confront Chris and Mat with the truth about those hard knocks, and how determined she is to escape male control once and for all, McWhorter rises admirably to the occasion.

ANNA CHRISTIE

Play by Eugene O’Neill. Adapted and directed by Scott Edmiston. Presented by Lyric Stage Company of Boston, through May 6. Tickets: From $25, 617-585-5678, www.lyricstage.com

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter@GlobeAucoin