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Asbury Park Press
Driving ‘Miss Julie’ in Manasquan
Friday, March 19, 2004
by Tom Chesek
Asbury Park Press Correspondent
That sound
you hear isn’t the late August Strindberg spinning
in his grave – it’s the ever-shifting
dynamics of sexual power plays that hum like a subterranean
engine room beneath the Two River Theatre Company
production of “Miss Julie.” The fascinating
rethinking of the Swedish playwright’s 1888
play is on display at Manasquan’s Algonquin
Arts Theatre.
It could be argued that Strindberg (1849-1912), who
was something of a self-styled “bad boy” of letters in the 100-plus years before that became a cliché, would have cackled with a certain diabolical glee over what the folks at Two River have done to this one-act tragedy, a classic clash of sexual obsessions and social obstructions. This was, after all, the same cat who regularly railed against everything from the linear logic of stage directors to the lemming-like laziness of theatrical audiences, an artist who regarded the controversies kicked up by his creative endeavors as a badge of honor.
Antique though the drama may be, “Miss Julie”
was never anything less than a thoroughly modern milestone
in the development of theater as we know it. It’s
a frank and fast-paced piece performed without intermission
by a bare-bones cast, employing the author’s
then-radical notions of lighting, set design and scene
changes. That doesn’t even begin to touch upon
the subject matter: a study of forbidden lust between
a “degenerate” young woman of breeding
and an ambitious commoner who also happens to be her
father’s household servant.
This class-based conflict was enough to get the play
banned from public performance on the Continent for
nearly 20 years, although it’s a stretch to
imagine contemporary crowds getting their briefs in
a bunch over the original Strindberg chapter and verse.
With that in mind, Two River executive producer Robert
Rechnitz and artistic director Jonathan Fox commissioned
director Jane Page (noted for her fresh takes on numerous
Shakespeare war horses) to give “Miss Julie”
an extreme makeover that would capture the imagination
of a domestic audience.
The result, specially adapted by the director from Harry G. Carlson’s oft-produced translation, is for all practical purposes the world premiere of an inspired new work, one that's good enough to possibly establish a new standard in how this play will be performed in America from now on.
Taking the opposite tack from the sort of impulse
that usually generates concepts like “Romeo
and Juliet” in the Miami drug wars, Page has
sent Miss Julie back in time to a post-Civil War Louisiana
plantation in 1865 – more than two decades before
the Strindberg original was ever written – with
Julie the belle of a once-proud family lorded over
by the unseen “Captain.” Driver and footman
Jean has been recast as a freed slave, and the revels
and rituals of Mardi Gras serve to “ratchet
up the play’s incendiary themes,” as the
promotional materials for the production make clear.
Far from being a gimmicky hook, this substitution of race for class informs and supercharges every aspect of this production, investing even the most melodramatic business with a new sense of immediacy and casting every last detail into a new perspective.
When the fiery-yet-fragile Julie (Heather Lea Anderson) opts to spend her Mardi Gras slumming with the servants, looking for a dance with the handsome and proudly confident Jean (Ed Onipede Blunt), there’s little
doubt that anything good can befall the characters,
given the realities of their time and place. When
Jean sells Julie on a dream of opening a hotel in
Mexico, there’s already no hope of their relationship
even making it beyond the door of the servants’
quarters.
And when the characters despair of there being no
way out of their predicament, there’s the chilling
certainty that there is in fact nowhere for these
people to go.
As the two leads – can we even really think
of this manipulative duo as lovers? – Anderson
and Blunt participate in their own little Reconstruction:
namely, the complete retooling of a couple of classic
characters from the ground up. Neither Julie nor Jean
are precisely what they’ve made themselves out
to be; her fine breeding is ultimately as threadbare
as his courage. The actors approach their parts as
if they’re the first to have played them, which
in a sense they are.
Make no mistake, the Jane Page “Julie”
is a harsher, scarier vision of the ill-fated tryst
than anything you’ll find in the Strindberg
text. It’s grimmer and jarringly violent in its denouement, infinitely more sexy in its visualization of the couple's obsessive passions and laced with a taut and smoldering energy even in its quietest moments.
This is the sort of show in which a lot goes on before
it starts. Nedrah Banks (solid in the smallish role
of household cook Kristine) putters about the kitchen
set for a good 10 minutes ahead of curtain time, and
the towering manor-house pillars of Harry Feiner’s
scenic design whets the appetite every bit as much
as the aroma of fried chicken that wafts out into
the seats (best to stock up on the Kit-Kats and Twix
prior to show time).
The cast is abetted tremendously by Deborah Caney’s
detailed costumes, and sound designer Kevin Dunayer
evokes the world beyond the kitchen walls with a facility
that reaches a fever pitch during the tabletop lovemaking
scene.
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