Miss Julie (review)

In hands less agile than those at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, a production of Strindberg's play, in which a servant on a Swedish estate seduces the aristocratic title character during Midsummer Eve celebrations, could easily devolve into an hour and a half of monstrous characters sordidly mistreating one another. Director Anders Cato (who commissioned Craig Lucas's adaptation of the play) was able to tease out its psychological and thematic nuances in a production that was both elegant and fearless.

One of the substantial pleasures was the subtlety with which the production design served the play—from Matthew E. Adelson's lighting and Scott Killian's music (the latter so subtle as to be nearly subliminal) to the set and costumes. Olivera Gajic fashioned elegant and understated costumes; only the dusty mauve of Miss Julie's gown strayed from a narrow range of browns, grays, black, and white.

Most notable was John McDermott's set; like Gajic, McDermott worked with a limited and austere palette: black iron, battered steel, grimy white flooring. The grand stove Strindberg's stage directions specify was an iron monstrosity topped by a steel hood streaked with soot from a thousand meals. Stage right just off the kitchen was Jean's cramped bedroom. Downstage stood a massive cutting block (where Jean unhesitatingly beheads Julie's songbird) and, seemingly at attention throughout the ninety-minute play, the riding boots of Miss Julie's father. The boots anticipated the initial parley between Julie and Jean in which she demands he kiss her boot. They also evoked the oppressive reign of the father over the servants and family alike. A battered steel-topped table dominated center stage. Mounted on wheels, it pivoted on the steel shaft rising from the center—a feature that gained particular prominence in the seduction scene.

Lucas's adaptation, by turns plain-spoken and lyrical as the story demands, deviated significantly from the original by presenting the encounter between Jean and Miss Julie. It was during this scene that the purpose of the wheeled table became clear. As a bare-chested Jean manipulated a submissive Julie in his bedroom, the reveling servants on the estate crowded raucously into the kitchen. Atop each end of the kitchen table, pairs of drunken servants mimed copulation while others spun the table on its pivot. The more frenzied the couples grew, the faster the table spun. What initially in the production seemed like a facile joke—it was hardly accidental that, in a play about violent shifts and reversals of power in a master-servant relationship, the tables were literally turned—ultimately evoked the dizzying mixture of pleasure and punishment in Jean and Julie's relationship.

The three principals—Rebecca Creskoff (the relatively sober role of Kristine, the cook and Jean's fiancée); Marin Hinkle (the title role); and Mark Feuerstein (Jean)—were first-rate. Hinkle and Feuerstein threw themselves into difficult roles ferociously. Hinkle's delicate features and voice registered Miss Julie's conflicting responses to her violent liaison with Jean. The close of the play—when she capitulates to Jean's whispered suggestion that she kill herself—was devastating; Hinkle, her steps as uncertain as her gaze was steady, walked silently offstage, her eyes fixed upon the straight razor she held open before her.

Feuerstein—broad-shouldered and husky-voiced—was certainly up to handling the ferocity and swagger of Jean's character. But Feuerstein was also remarkably adept at limning one of the play's few lyrical moments, Jean's story about first seeing Miss Julie. He would have her believe that it was his first capitulation to love even as it constituted a brutal reinforcement of the division between the upper classes and those who serve them: the fanciful outbuilding he took for an aristocratic playhouse he soon discovered to be a privy. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the role is Jean's shocking breakdown at the...