"a powerful play...brilliantly cast"

July 4, 2002 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Anders Cato’s production of Strindberg's Miss Julie at the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theatre would delight the Swedish playwright. Mr. Cato, who did a literal translation of the play from which Craig Lucas fashioned a gutsy and yet poetic version of the dialog, has a deep emotional bond with his fellow countryman that brings the play, first staged in 1889, into contemporary theatre while keeping the set and costuming those of more than a century ago.

Although dozens of American playwrights, from O’Neill to Albee, acknowledge admiration of and debts to Strindberg, his contemporary, Ibsen, is far more often produced than the Swedish innovator. While Ibsen was content to keep his characters in the drawing room, Strindberg was after something grittier.

His theme for Julie is the love-hate relationship of the sex war, complicated by the class war between those above- and below-stairs. For the play he wrote a long preface, spelling out his aims and instituting the naturalistic/realistic bent that has dominated theatre for a century.

And he set his play in the kitchen. This seemingly simple fact has had more relevance than seems at first apparent. Odets' characters Awake and Sing in the kitchen; Willie Loman’s kitchen looms large in Death of a Salesman; Marsha Norman won a Pulitzer for 'Night Mother; and any TV viewer of Everybody Loves Raymond knows not only his kitchen but that of his parents.

The kitchen looms even larger in the current production of Miss Julie, a magnificently designed one evoking the grandeur of the rooms above it and the seemingly great distance between them. The master’s boots dominate the space downstage center. This production will kick them into a corner, but they will be in place again at the end, too powerful a symbol to ignore.

And Strindberg’s restless genius demanded not only the symbolism of boots, but hinted at a surreal sadistic/masochistic quality that would soon surface in plays such as his The Ghost Sonata and The Dream Play. The Cato-Lucas script has used these hints as well.

While Strindberg’s script asks for mime and ballet to replace intermissions, the current production replaces the gamboling peasants’ invasion of the kitchen with a sound-scape of loud banging whirling figures and noises, full of sexual innuendo, that accentuate surrealistically the lust behind the bedroom door, one that in Strindberg’s day had to only suggest, but one that in this brutally frank version is symbolically open to us while realistically closed.

The plot concerns the seduction, and its aftermath, of a disillusioned young girl who on a sultry summer night while her father is away and the peasants are celebrating a holiday in the barn, flirts her way into the bed of her father’s valet, and ends with what happens when both panic at the thought of the consequences.

The three characters in this production are brilliantly cast and attuned to the jarring and seemingly non-sequential dialog shifts that like music weave themes of intensity with those of quiet, and drop a theme only to take it up again in a different key.

Marin Hinkle as Julie enters the kitchen imperious, flirtatious and demanding. She is disillusioned and reckless, bored and self-hating. She sports a confidence she does not feel and plays dangerously with gestures she should not make. She inflames the man whom she considers a lackey but envies him too. She feels a lust she does not want to understand and hates herself for feeling it. She also hates the valet who inspires it. She ends, docile, abject, incapable of action. All these fluctuating moods and nuances, Hinkle handles with skill.

As Jean, the valet, Mark Feuerstein changes his tone, body language and vocal range as often as he changes his jackets. He attempts deference to Julie’s position and attempts resistance to his lust. But he does so while drinking his master’s wine. He too is in the grip the love-hate sexual drive of the play, and Julie’s advances and the circumstances pull him into the action he will regret as soon as it is over. He daydreams an escape that he knows will be nothing but misery. He too in the end is abject, chained to a bell.

Rebecca Creskoff’s Kristine, the cook, has a smaller but vital role. In it she brings her glorious red-hair and her handsome figure into the triangle and along with it her very secure knowledge of her “place” but also her “rights” and her self-righteous piety. As servant she will give over her next dance with Jean and let Julie take it, she will cook the smelly gruel to abort Julie’s wayward dog, but she has her own claims upon Jean and will assert them when needed. She is disgusted with his actions but does not forget before she leaves for church (where the sermon fittingly is to concern the beheading of John the Baptist) to warn the stable against letting out the horses.

This is a powerful play. One so challenging that Strindberg was forbidden to stage it in Stockholm. Casting his wife as Julie, he tried to present it in Denmark where the police closed it down. For several years it flourished only in avant-garde theatres such as Antoine’s Theatre Libre in Paris. Eventually, Strindberg staged it in his own Intimate Theatre in Stockholm. There, unexpectedly, Bernard Shaw showed up, with his wife, wanting to meet the author and to see the play. Strindberg quickly assembled the actors and he and the two Shaws saw a private performance.

Evidently Shaw was impressed. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1933 he devoted a great deal of the money for the translating of Strindberg into English. Shaw too would no doubt be happy with Mr. Cato.