MISS JULIE: DEPRAVITY OR LICENSE
MISS JULIE
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
The Aurora Theatre Company of Berkeley is presently staging MISS JULIE by August Strindberg as adapted by Helen Cooper and directed by the award winning Mark Jackson.
Structurally and psychologically, the play is reminiscent of Jean-Paul
Sartre's NO EXIT.
As in NO EXIT, three people set up a dynamic that is more of a tug-of-war or a rugby match, than a romantic relationship.
To remove any speculation as to who influenced whom, be aware that Strindberg wrote MISS JULIE in 1888: just after the glacial sheet retreated north of Stockholm; while Sartre did not pronounce his dictum, "Hell is other people," or "l'enfer, c'est les autres" until 1944: when the Germans were nervously goose stepping backwards: to the ruins of Berlin.
Strindberg's play is relatively mild fare to our contemporary society wherein nearly everyone can afford the privilege of cultivating ordinary ennui and existential angst until it blossoms or metastasizes into a full blown neurosis garnished with bourgeois materialism and ladles of sexual promiscuity, but MISS JULIE was initially banned in most of the civilized western European countries.
Even Sweden would not permit the play to be produced until 1906.
While it is one thing to be "banned in Boston," it is another thing altogether to be banned in Sweden: home to Bastu (consensual flagellating with birch switches), naked Sauna, nude snow rolling, ice swimming in the buff, the racy Volvo 1800S sports sedan and Swedish vodka.
The British, on the other hand, would not stage MISS JULIE until 1939; and who wants to go see Swedish eroticism during the London blitz?
Lauren Grace plays the sizzling aristocratic Miss Julie who, while celebrating the Summer Solstice decides to play the role of dominatrix and melt down the class barriers between her and her footman: Jean (played by Mark Anderson Phillips).
The footman's lover Christine (a.k.a. the kitchen slut; played by Beth Deitchman) looks on with cool detachment, counting on class structure to ultimately restore Jean's ardor back to her.
True to the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock, the meat cleaver stabbed into the kitchen table as the curtain goes up, does get used for purposes other than preparing the meat dish or cutting the brie.
Strindberg takes his audience on an erotic excursion.
The audience, prompted in part by the pulchritude of the actress, is salaciously rooting for Miss Julie to compromise propriety, to violate employer-employee protocols, to dismantle class structure and to dissolve the flimsy moral rectitude of the vacillating Jean.
After a full-scale capitulation to craven animal instincts, DNA demanding replication and the tyranny of selfish genes, one would expect that Jean and Julie had stripped themselves down to the bare basics of the human condition and we ready to get real with each other.
But alas, as Uncle Cusper used to say, "true lust never ran a straight course."
Award winning costume designer Fumiko Bielefeldt has resourcefully outfitted the cast with costumes that reflect the appropriate historical era, the prim culture, the character's social station and the predatory agenda of Julie.
For titillation, erudition, edification and just a smidgen of eroticism, get thee to the Aurora Theatre soon: when word of Lauren Grace's superlative performance gets out, you may be buying your tickets from a scalper at twice the price.
Surf on over to www.auroratheatre.org or call 510-843-4822.
Feeling the pinch at the grocery store? Make dinner for $10 or less.