MISS JULIE
Geniuses are rarely pleasant people in the ordinary social sense, but August Strindberg continues to hold the prize for the one with whom you would least want to share an office. Although recognized as Sweden’s most prominent playwright (in most theater history texts, Sweden’s only playwright) and certainly one of the first to break with the 19th-century melodrama forms in favor of a drama based on realism and the recent discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Strindberg bordered on psychotic, which made for distortions in the “reality” he purported to depict (in contrast with the rationalism of his contemporaries Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw). His own childhood as one of 12 children in an impoverished family, the loss of his mother when he was only 13, and his father’s subsequent marriage to their young housekeeper all left Strindberg with an idealized view of the female sex, which emerges in his early plays as a vehement mistrust of all women who do not meet his impossible standard. That mistrust is divided between contempt for the submissive “female slave, spineless and phlegmatic . . . bovinely unconscious of her own hypocrisy”and fear and hatred for the dominating “man-hating half-woman type [that] forces itself on others, selling itself for power . . . as it formerly sold itself for money . . . propagat[ing] its misery on the following generation.” That is how Strindberg describes the two main female characters of Miss Julie.
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The conversion of the Swedish American Museum Center’s basement to a playing area–by means of folding chairs, a few lights clamped to ceiling pipes, and many curtains fashioned from bed sheets–gives the production an unfortunately amateurish look, for which the unsubsidized company is not necessarily to be held responsible (unlike the decision to have two intermissions, stretching the running time of the two one-acts to a little under three hours, and a ludicrously literal decapitation of a patently fake canary, complete with blood spurting from the incision).
