Mies Julie ★★★
A late 19th century trio of European playwrights significantly influenced the development of 20th century Western drama: Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg.
Plays composed by Ibsen and Chekhov still appear on stages with some frequency today, but not so much those by Strindberg. Why productions of Strindberg’s works are relatively rare these days is an essay best left for another time. For now, Classic Stage Company offers Strindberg’s Miss Julie and The Dance of Death in separate productions running concurrently at its theater.
Well, in the case of the first play, what’s actually being performed is not Strindberg’s Miss Julie, but rather Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie, which is about as proximate to the original as South Africa is to Sweden.
In Farber’s extreme adaptation of Strindberg’s work, the place and time of the drama has been transposed from 1880s Sweden to 2012 South Africa and its dynamic changed into a symbolic power struggle between white and black people within the nation’s post-apartheid society. Julie (Elise Kibler) no longer is a young, aristocratic woman but here a slutty country girl in a skimpy red sundress whose provocative teasing of John (James Udom), her father’s farmhand, eventually leads to copulation on the kitchen table at midnight and suicide at dawn.
The character of Christine (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), the cook, no longer is John’s fiancée as in the original, but rather his aged mother, haunted by the awareness that this farmhouse has been built upon the graves of ancestors. Meanwhile, Ukhokho (Vinie Burrows), an ancestral ghost, silently prowls the premises. Their presence furthers Farber’s socio-political angle regarding how South Africa is in the painful process of being returned to its native people.
Purists will not be pleased by Farber’s significant retooling of a classic, yet there’s no denying how effectively the director, Shariffa Ali, cranks up the psychosexual heat in the kitchen to a sizzling temperature as Kibler’s petulant, panicky Julie and Udom’s prideful John face off during their fatal 75-minute encounter. The relentlessness to their performances foreshadows the conclusion.
The action, like that for The Dance of Death, is presented in an arena staging. Smoky, at times eerie, lighting by Stacey Derosier suffuses the visuals. Quentin Chiappetta’s sound design for the world outside the kitchen, mixed with Andrew Orkin’s percussive music, which uses African tribal instruments, lends appropriate atmospherics.
This gritty Mies Julie really is not Strindberg’s tragedy, but it succeeds as a forceful drama in its own right.
[Read David Finkle’s review of the two plays here.]
The Dance of Death ★★
The same cannot be said for this production of The Dance of Death. Irish playwright Conor McPherson remains faithful to the story’s locale at a military base on an island off the coast of Sweden and retains its 1900 period. Readers who may be familiar with the work (which Strindberg wrote in two versions) should be aware that McPherson’s adaptation concerns a husband-wife-lover triangle rather than its subsequent, somewhat more hopeful iteration, which adds two adult offspring into the conflict.
Strindberg’s bleak comedy studies the tortured ties binding Edgar (Richard Topol) and Alice (Cassie Beck), a married couple who have been making each other miserable for the last 25 years. Their sullen, often spiteful, isolated existence together is pierced by the arrival of Kurt (Christopher Innvar), Alice’s cousin, who nurses his own troubles. As Edgar exhibits increasing eccentricities suggesting mental breakdown, Alice turns seductive towards a not unreceptive Kurt.
In the end, however, Kurt escapes this situation while the husband and wife wearily become reconciled. “Our eternal torment will return, you know,” says Alice, to which Edgar responds that if they can only remain patient, someday death will release them. “If only,” she replies.
McPherson’s adaptation is fluent, but this production does not nearly do it justice. Witnessed at a preview a week ago, the performances seemed flat. Perhaps they simply had yet to jell by then.
Or perhaps such a disappointing impression results from crucial miscasting: A capable, relatively youthful actor, lately seen as the unhappy daughter/sister in The Humans, Beck does not appear suited to the role of Alice, although she has been unflatteringly dressed and made up to look like a middle-aged matron. A bitter, even nasty soul (it’s been suggested that Strindberg’s model was his first wife), Alice is the catalyst who drives the drama and might be more vividly expressed by a Marin Ireland or an Elizabeth Marvel, who do so well by malevolent characters.
The production, competently staged by Victoria Clark, begins with Edgar and Alice dancing through the formal paces of a waltz to icy piano music composed by Jeff Blumenkrantz, whose occasional music adds an ominous chill to the nearly two-hour occasion. Clark’s subsequent staging otherwise looks realistic. The set, costume, lighting, and sound designs likewise are comparably natural. One wonders whether taking a more stylized approach to the play would strengthen its comedic aspects, or at least generate a weird electricity that might enliven this rather spiritless event.
Mies Julie and The Dance of Death opened February 10, 2019, at the Classic Stage Company and are performed in rep through March 10. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
