Review: Court Theatre‘s staging of ‘Miss Julie’ tackles class warfare with unsettling immediacy
Truly, there is nothing like a scorching psychosexual bad romance to warm the dregs of a midwestern winter. August Strindberg's “Miss Julie” checks all those boxes, packing them into a sometimes squirm-inducing class conflict that ends with a shocking denouement that’s either tragic, karmic or some twisted version of both.
Court Theatre Associate Artistic Director Gabrielle Randle-Bent’s 90-minute staging doesn’t move Strindberg’s three-person drama from late 19th-century Sweden. But this is no period piece. Randle-Bent brings it to the Hyde Park theater with unsettling immediacy. The cast creates a world of discord, tension and volatility as an aristocrat is pitted against a valet in a struggle for power, control, love and self-determination.
Translated with elegance and impact by Harry G. Carlson, “Miss Julie,” lives at the trip-wire intersection of gender and class. Both come into play when the aristocrat Miss Julie (Mi Kang) insistently and drunkenly tries to seduce her father’s valet, Jean (Kelvin Roston Jr.) on Midsummer’s Eve. The consequences are extreme, the bloody decapitation of a pet finch the least of them.
In his intro to “Miss Julie,” Strindberg wrote that the play was about Darwinism. That tracks: The plot is essentially a battle between aristocrats and working people, both struggling for agency and primacy. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest story, set not in the wild but in a bastion of domesticity — a well-appointed kitchen.
The road from kitchen to perdition runs through the course of Sweden’s Midsummer’s Eve celebrations. The revels are offstage, but they’re no match for the fireworks detonating in the manor where Miss Julie lives with her father, a count. In addition to Miss Julie and Jean, the stabbing points of the manor triangle include Jean’s fiancee Kristine (Rebecca Spence), a cook.
Randle-Bent directs her ensemble with blistering impact. At first, you think you know Miss Julie. Kang initially shows us a tipsy, clueless, rich girl who, like Gatsby, thoughtlessly imperils people without the protection of money or social status. She’s also the worst kind of condescending: “It must be terrible to be poor,” she tells Jean in one of many cringe-worthy bits of dialogue.
In addition to making Jean hers, Miss Julie wants to abandon her privileged life, or at least believes that’s what she wants. She’s fresh from a humiliating breakup that involved public screaming and a broken riding crop, and although she insists she’s fine, her obsessive stabbing of the kitchen table with a cleaver says otherwise. Ditto pressing her palm to a burning stovetop. Kang goes deeper and deeper until Miss Julie is in a lightless abyss of her own making. The velocity of her unraveling is more than a little terrifying.
In Roston’s capable hands, Jean’s attempts to fend off Miss Julie’s advances struggle alongside his ambition to transcend his station in life. Roston has equal finesse with comedy and ferocity, instilling both with the dignity of somebody who is well aware of his worth, even when he’s furiously scraping the muck from the count’s riding boots. (The count is never seen. Tellingly, his boots stand in the kitchen like silent sentries throughout.)
Roston has a gift for withering zingers. When their roles are fleetingly reversed and Jean issues a command to Miss Julie, she plaintively asks why he’s being so unkind. “Orders are never kind,” he tells her. “Now you know.” It’s a mic drop moment.
As Kristine, Spence navigates the fine line between sanctimonious and sympathetic. She also powers several wild, wordless cooking and baking scenes, swirling flour, frying kidneys and kneading bread with an intensity that borders on mania. As the kitchen heats up, Willow James’ sound design crescendos from harmonious strings to dissonant percussion while Keith Parham’s lights blink and stutter. The sequences are eardrum-rattling, retina-searing and hypnotic.
John Culbert’s set design is beautifully Swedish with pale wood dominating a kitchen under a bower of herbs, evergreens and lilacs hanging like a verdant crown over the players. What doesn’t work in the set is the misguided voile scrim that surrounds the kitchen. It blurs both performers and the set’s gorgeous interior.
If you’ve seen the 2019 horror film “Midsommar,” you know things can get weird in the Nordic lands around the solstice. More than a century earlier, Strindberg used the specter of the midnight sun to frame an out-of-joint world.
Sweden had counts and servants. We have oligarchs and minimum wage. Who survives and who goes the way of Miss Julie’s finch is the question at the root of “Miss Julie.” Court’s production asks it with fiery urgency.