.The Cruelty of Miss Julie

New staging at Aurora Theatre makes it hard to tell who's on top.

Social class was a slippery thing for Swedish playwright August
Strindberg, who grew up in abject poverty, one of thirteen children
born to a servant and a shipping clerk. He may in some ways have
resembled Jean, the well-spoken footman who seduces a Count’s daughter
in Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, now playing at Berkeley’s
Aurora Theatre. Both were sharp, rebellious men who understood the
durability of class barriers, but refused to merely accept their lot.
The ever-incorrigible Strindberg was, in fact, always imperiling his
own fragile position. Educated in a middle-class private school and at
the University of Uppsala, he easily gained membership in the upper
echelons of Swedish society — a place he obviously never felt
comfortable. He ruined three marriages with women of good stock, and
wrote a spate of radical, anarchic plays about class and gender
struggles. Miss Julie was Strindberg’s tour de force. It
scandalized his contemporaries in 1888, and, when acted well, it can
still scandalize an audience in 2009.

The plot of Miss Julie is a pretty basic allegory: A valet
trying to sleep his way up encounters an aristocrat trying to sleep her
way down. They dance together at a Midsummer’s Eve celebration, then
retreat to the kitchen for a long, heated flirtation right in front of
the cook Christine, who is the valet’s fiancé. Animated by the
dance, Miss Julie (Lauren Grace) wants to prolong her escapist fantasy
by toying with Jean (Mark Anderson Phillips), who responds in kind
— probably because he sees her as the gatekeeper who will pluck
him from working-class drudgery and fulfill his dreams of being an
innkeeper. Yet both are ambivalent. She exploits her position by
commanding him to put on the Count’s jacket, to join her for another
dance, even to kiss her shoe — all the while telling him to
“forget about rank.” He cautiously accepts, but takes note of the
impropriety, even telling her that the other servants are pointing
fingers and singing a song to mock them. Only after a lot of deception
and alcohol does he coax her into his bedroom. That’s when the drama
really begins.

Strindberg was astute enough to realize that class never really
trumps gender — in fact, the two are roughly equivalent. Miss
Julie has a certain coarseness that defies her social strata. She
drinks full glasses of beer in one gulp, climbs on top of the kitchen
table (and later lies under it), and enjoys messing about with the
rabble. Perhaps she’s trying to gain acceptance in the working class by
masquerading as one of them. Or perhaps, as Miss Julie claims, she was
raised as a tomboy and never quite got it out of her system. Either
way, she looks like a minstrel overcompensating for her differences
with Jean, who at many points gets the upper-hand.

In Aurora’s production — based on a brilliant translation by
Helen Cooper — the differences between Jean and Miss Julie get as
much traction as their similarities. Thus the actors appear to
constantly be jockeying for position. Grace and Phillips spar with
their eyes, using subtle shifts in gaze to indicate who’s on top at any
given moment. Their chemistry is underscored by sexy classical music,
recorded for this production by the Real Vocal String Quartet. But it’s
also communicated through tense, protracted silences. Beth Deitchman’s
cook Christine is the lowest character, class-wise, but also the
sturdiest; her face remains firm and placid to conceal her animosity
toward Miss Julie. The play’s cruelest moment happens when Deitchman
creeps into the kitchen in the middle of the night to overhear Jean and
Julie tussling in his bedroom. It’s a violent example of forced
voyeurism, apparently added in by Cooper or director Mark Jackson. In
the original version their affair is merely implied, even though it’s
the central event in the play.

All three actors are quite canny, and able to inhabit a world with
no real moral center. (Even Christine, who accepts bribes from other
servants and has a temper tantrum toward the play’s end, is no virtuous
sufferer.) Still, it’s Grace who really carries this production.
Beautiful in a sharp, icy way, she makes her face hard and drawn and
turns her eyes into tiny knife-points. She’s the “slut” in this drama,
but her gaze is chilling and utterly void of sensuality. Even when she
and Jean are about to kiss for the first time, she looks more like a
blood-sucking spider than a bedazzled young woman, so it’s no surprise
when she pulls back and slaps him instead.

Phillips makes his character the lusty one, flinging a cleaver about
as he talks or rabidly kissing Miss Julie’s shoe. He’s a striver,
obviously, and a rather malicious one at that. But Phillips’ Jean also
has a certain fragility that belies the character’s ambitions. He has
weird intonation and over-enunciates his Ts. He shines his master’s
boots with a kind of dutiful pride. That could be an intentional way of
emphasizing Jean’s class-consciousness, but it also makes him seem a
little too dorky to be the ultimate cause of Miss Julie’s comeuppance.
All in all, Miss Julie seems more befouled by her own mistakes than by
the actions of a predatory servant. She shifts the play from a power
struggle to a tale of self-immolation. When Miss Julie finally reaches
her tragic end, you’ll feel as if you’ve spent a whole night, drinking,
carousing, and messing up along with her.

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