Ghost light in a darkened theater. Photograph by Jon Ellwood, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

During a week in December when violence seemed to rap on every door, I saw two plays about women who take their lives into their own hands: Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and Anna Christie at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The plays were written thirty years apart. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in 1891, and Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill in 1921. That year, Alexander Woollcott, reviewing the first production of Anna Christie for the New York Times, wrote, “All grown-up playgoers should jot down in their notebooks the name of Anna Christie as that of a play they really ought to see.” Though O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie, the play has been infrequently performed. It is being directed now by Thomas Kail, and Anna is played by his wife, Michelle Williams. On the other hand, Hedda Gabler, directed this time by James Bundy and starring Marianna Gailus, is a warhorse.

Both plays are about traps, and both confound expectations. Anna, a pinup saint, is stymied by circumstance but frees herself. Hedda, a monster, steps backward into a baroque ambuscade of her own making. In Anna and Hedda we see our best and worst selves, for who doesn’t wish that things were other than they are? Seen one after another, the plays turn each other inside out: One is about the ability to change—to respond and to evolve. The other is about egomania.

Each play is in four acts and begins with the end of a journey. Hedda Gabler, the beautiful, self-absorbed daughter of an impecunious general, has returned to Christiania (now Oslo) after a six-month honeymoon with her new husband, George Tesman; she is now Mrs. Tesman, but the name of the play underscores that her father, dead, remains the center of her life. She has married the pedantic, fussy Tesman as a last resort, but why she chose Tesman over her other suitors isn’t clear—he’s as friable as a dry leaf. Marianna Gailus plays Hedda so splendidly—like a painted top at top speed—and Max Gordon Moore is so clownishly devoted as her dotard of a husband that, at least for a minute, we’re mesmerized by her and discount him. Hedda is as willful as Eris, who threw the golden apple and started the Trojan War. Her traits are egotism, cruelty, and dissociation. Her interest is showing off, and her hobby is belittlement. She insults George’s Aunt Juliane by mocking her new hat and pretending to mistake it for the charwoman’s. “Is there anything the matter with you, Hedda? Eh?” asks George, at the end of the first scene.

Well, yes. The morning brings a visit from Mrs. Thea Elvsted, an old schoolmate, who has left her husband for Hedda’s former lover Eilert Lövborg, an academic in George’s field who has written a bestseller. (This is hard to fathom, as George’s work is about the domestic industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages.) Lövberg is embarked on a new great work but hobbled by a drinking problem from which Thea is set on saving him. A second visitor is the oleaginous Judge Brack, who has his eye on Hedda. Soon Hedda’s scheme slithers into sight. She will sever Thea from Lövberg—why not?—and lure him back to the bottle. At her urging, Eilert and George go out on the town. George comes home  near dawn. He has found Eilert’s precious manuscript in the street and gives it to Hedda for safekeeping. When Eilert, raving, reappears, he announces that he has destroyed the manuscript. Thea leaves in despair. Hedda gives Eilert a pistol and urges him to commit suicide: “Take it, and use it now … beautifully.” He rushes off; Hedda retrieves the intact manuscript and feeds it into the fire. Eilert does indeed shoot himself, gruesomely and unbeautifully, in a brothel—the gun discharges into his groin. Judge Brack tells Hedda that he knows she gave Eilert the pistol; the price of his silence will be sexual favors. When George and Thea go upstairs to begin to try to piece together the manuscript from Thea’s notes, Hedda neatly shoots herself in the temple. Other antiheroines—Medea, Lady Macbeth—are evildoers for cause, but the root of Hedda’s drive to dominate and destroy is mysterious and implacable. “These impulses come over me suddenly and I cannot resist them,” says Hedda to Judge Brack. Like Daisy Buchanan—another virtuoso sociopath—she’s careless and smashes things up.

The heroine of O’Neill’s Anna Christie, the daughter of a Swedish seaman, is beset rather than careless. After her mother dies, her father sends her to live with cousins in Minnesota to keep her away from the sea, which he reviles. As a child, Anna is worked almost to death on the family farm, then raped as a teenager. She escapes to Chicago and finds work as a nursemaid but ends up on the streets. Anna’s early life is an amplitude of deprivation.

When the play opens, her father, Chris Christophersen, has received a letter from her at his poste restante—an Irish bar near the Boston docks. He’s sworn off the sea and become the captain of a coal barge. Chris is thrilled that Anna is coming to see him. (In one of the most gracious breakup scenes in the theater, his lady love, Marthy, a tramp, tells him she will skedaddle to make room for Anna.) No gorgeous gowns for her: Anna arrives off the night train in a tattered coat and a squashed hat. Like her father, we learn within minutes, she’s a drinker. After a happy if tentative reunion, and Anna—suspicious of the sea and sorry her father is not a respectable janitor, as she had thought—is convinced to come along on the coal barge. At Saint Ann’s, the opening scene in the bar is beautifully articulated. By the time Anna steps on stage, the relationships between Chris, the bartender, Johnny-the-Priest, and Marthy have been so well played, moment to moment, that their whisky-soaked constellation catches Williams’s waifish Anna like a cosmic butterfly net.

Out on the coal barge, Anna is transformed: she’s as happy as a clam. The stage darkens, waves roil, and a sailor, Mat Burke, washes up on deck. Within moments, he claims her as his own. Her father objects. They fight over her. “Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture!” Anna exclaims (at Saint Ann’s, she remonstrates from atop a table). At first she won’t say why she won’t marry Mat, a coal stoker, but finally she comes clean. She loves him, but she can’t marry him because he thinks she’s a nice girl, but she ain’t, and she won’t marry him under false pretenses. After a blowup, Chris forgives her—he’s devastated by what his neglect has wrought. “Don’t bawl about it,” Anna says to her father, in what may be as close to a manifesto we get from O’Neill: “There ain’t nothing to forgive, anyway. It ain’t your fault and it ain’t mine and it ain’t his neither. We’re all poor nuts. And things happen.”

Her lover vows to shoot her. For veteran theatergoers, as O’Neill knew, Mat’s gun is bad news; it’s bound to go off sooner or later. That this proves not be the case adds to the plot’s poignant surprise. When Mat comes back, what turns out to matter to him is that Anna loves him, and this love, he believes, will redeem her. You’re not the same person now that you love me, he says, and he means it. Sometimes bad things don’t happen.

Fingers crossed. Anna Christie is O’Neill’s most hopeful play. But to Ibsen’s Hedda, haunted by a sense of powerlessness that leads her to want to degrade or manipulate others, everyone is a piece of furniture. From Hedda Gabler we learn what happens—should we need reminding—when someone who is addicted to show and treachery, who likes pulling the legs off spiders, when her egoism isn’t checked. Writing to me about one of the tragedies that occurred a few weeks ago, at Brown, in Sydney, in Los Angeles, in Boston, a friend said, “I don’t know how to get my head around it.”

The lasting power of Hedda Gabler is that we can’t get our head around her. “Is there something wrong with you, Hedda? Eh?” asks George. The question echoes down the corridor of time. What can it be? How can we fix it? The power of Anna Christie, a girl of the Limberlost who stands up and says, I’ll take whatever’s coming to me, but I know how to love, and I know how to tell the truth, is that we can.

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent books are the novels Estate and Inverno and the collection Next Day: New & Selected Poems.