You know Court Theatre’s production of August Strindberg’s 1889 “Miss Julie” is going to be different from others you’ve seen before the play even begins.
John Culbert’s scenic design features a full-length circular mesh enclosure amid garden plantings, and inside it is a Victorian-era kitchen with a massive wood-burning stove, well-stocked shelves and cabinets, a six-foot-long work table and hanging bunches of herbs, garlic and other comestibles.
The good news is that the set looks gorgeous, especially with Keith Parham’s sensuous lighting. The bad news is that the entire 95-minute one-act takes place inside the mesh enclosure. Perhaps it is meant to suggest that the three characters — the aristocratic Miss Julie (Mi Kang), the Count’s manservant Jean (Kelvin Roston Jr.) and the cook Kristine (Rebecca Spence) — are imprisoned like the finch in a big, covered birdcage Miss Julie wants to take with her, but it’s very distracting.
The even worse news is that the action opens with a drawn-out sequence of Kristine going about her business in this kitchen while blinding lights pop and flash and increasingly discordant, mostly electronic music blares (sound design by Willow James). Making sense of what she’s doing is a head-scratcher, too. She seems to combine and then knead the ingredients for bread, for example, but instead of setting it somewhere to proof or in the oven to bake, she just shoves the bowl under the table as part of cleaning up. Or that’s what it looked like, though by that time, my head was pounding from the noise.
Another source of confusion is the abortive tea Kristine makes for Miss Julie’s dog, Diana. She takes a bubbling pot of something out of the oven, but it’s not clear that’s the tea, and no one takes anything away for the dog. Then, in a departure from Strindberg’s original, instead of going offstage to slit her throat with Jean’s razor at the end, Miss Julie mixes up a bunch of dry ingredients from containers, adds water from the teapot and drinks the brew. The plot summary on Court’s website says she drinks Diana’s abortive tea, but that’s not at all clear. And that tea would not necessarily be fatal to humans.
The underlying problem is that director Gabrielle Randle-Bent imposes a vision on the play that doesn’t really fit. Besides making Julie’s suicide ambiguous, she puts the sex between Julie and Jean entirely on stage and has them turn the kitchen into a complete mess.
This might work if there were any chemistry between Kang and Roston Jr., but there isn’t much. The requisite sexual tension is missing from the flirtation and manipulation leading up to the sex act, a brief encounter on the table that comes across as uncomfortable and unsatisfactory for both of them. The aftermath is a litany of plans for the future, proposed and then discarded, with Kristine, the voice of conventional morality and behavior, stepping in to put the kibosh on any attempt at escape, and Jean retreating into subservience the minute he hears the Count’s bell.
The wild card here is Miss Julie. Kang plays her as a capricious manic-depressive person incapable of controlling her own behavior, much less anyone else’s, so it’s hard to believe she previously had a fiancé. Nor is it likely that Jean, an educated social climber who believes he’s above his station, would respond to her flirtation with anything except pity and a desire to stay out of trouble with his master, the Count, by getting her to back off.
In some ways, Raquel Adorno’s costumes sum up the characters. Kristine wears the sober period attire of her class, epitomized by her going-to-church outfit. Jean has several vests that he changes according to the situation. And Julie appears in a flowing cream peasant gown with red embroidery topped off for the Midsummer’s Eve celebrations with a garland of greenery. Her full-length, hooded traveling cloak makes her look like she just stepped out of a twisted fairy tale, a surreal, crazy person with red lipstick smeared all over her face.
Kang gives a wrenching performance, especially as the play progresses, but she’s not the Miss Julie I envision or that would captivate this Jean. In truth, Court’s production is off the mark in a number of ways.
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