Pericles and The Miss Julie Dream Project: Sort-of Shakespeare, and Sort-of Strindberg

There are dreams described within August Strindberg's 1888 play, Miss Julie — such as the moneyed title character being stranded on a pillar, and the object of her scandalous lust, a footman named Jean, stuck on the ground while yearning to climb trees.

But the play itself embodies the kind of slice-of-life naturalism embraced by so many of our TV dramas. The eponymous Miss Julie is the bored daughter of an estate owner. One day, with little better to do, Julie toys around in the servants' quarters during one of their parties. There she meets Jean, who is engaged to be married to another servant. Miss Julie and Jean conceal their meeting, which violates the time's rigid class structure, by stealing away. Their rapport in hiding consists of various sadomasochistic power games, and in their clandestine quarters they have shame-fueled sex — after which Jean urges Miss Julie to kill herself for her own good. Gentleman that he is, he courteously provides a razor.

Nine scribes from the group Fell Swoop Playwrights (Meghan Brown, Samm Hill, J. Holtham, Abbe Levine, Michelle Meyers, Tira Palmquist, Emily Brauer Rogers, Brenda Varda and Kyle T. Wilson) cobbled together their impressions of Miss Julie — addressing in an entirely new play the questions of how the classic work struck them and how it resonates today. Their collaborative effort, The Miss Julie Dream Project, initially conceived by Wilson, was first presented in this summer's Hollywood Fringe festival and has since been revised and honed for a short run at Son of Semele. It plays through this weekend.

PHOTO BY CRAIG SCHWARTZ

Deborah Strang, front, and the Chorus in Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Location Info

Map

A Noise Within

3352 E. Foothill Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107

Category: Theaters

Region: Glendale

Photos

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Son of Semele

3301 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004

Category: Community Venues

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

Related Stories

• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including an All-Female Hamlet
  September 12, 2013
• Tender Napalm
  March 21, 2013
• Theater to See This Week, Including John Henry Redwood's Trip Back to 1943 Harlem
  September 5, 2013
• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including a Pycho-Sexual Boxing Match
  March 21, 2013
• The Night of the Tribades
  November 25, 2010

More About

• August Strindberg
• Kyle Wilson
• Michelle Meyers
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Theatrical Plays

The setting is a theater company's production of Miss Julie, in which the newly hired and nervous actress, Mina (Lynn Adrianna), finds herself barely understanding the role. Meanwhile a tyrannical director (Edward Alvarado, playing to cliché as the director, and also terrific in other roles in this production) is in a panic because the play is supposed to open within the hour and Mina can't be found — though she stands before him.

Furthermore, Mina can't recall her lines. The production opens with her calling for her first line. Nobody else from the company can hear her, because nobody else can see her. The stage manager has cellphone glued to ear trying to discover where she might be.

This comedic, cruel absurdity is theme-and-variation on Christopher Durang's 1970s one-act, The Actor's Nightmare. But here it comes with a twist: The real Miss Julie (Elan O'Connor) has blown in on a zephyr and salvages the play-within-the-play, at least to some extent.

Seeing that she is Miss Julie rather than merely an actress portraying her, the thespians grapple with the exigencies of turning fiction into reality, or at least into the plausible illusion of reality.

At the same time, actress Mina and real person Miss Julie battle out their own identity crisis so that questions of who is real and who is acting, and what is real and what is illusion, keep bumping up against each other and sparking.

Strindberg's work has been widely criticized by feminists, who find his plays misogynistic. Miss Julie in particular has taken a drubbing — after all, Julie and Jean are equally culpable for their misdeed. Jean is actually engaged to somebody else, and so his betrayal is certainly the larger. Yet he, Julie and the author agree that Miss Julie deserves to be killed for her transgression.

Like many realistic plays, Miss Julie derives from Greek-tragic structure in which actions are motivated by discernible psychological reasons, inexorably linked to social causes. Both Julie and Jean feel trapped in their respective classes and curious about the forbidden other, hence their attraction, their guilt, their lusting to be punished for their forbidden desires. The result is a comforting relationship between cause and effect — the lunacy of the world makes sense, because it derives from something we can explain.

The primary beauty of the Fell Swoop Playwrights' project lies in the way it transforms the play's dodgy sexual politics — and Strindberg's psychological explanations for his characters' destructive behavior — from the logic of cause and effect to the surreal.

In this Miss Julie-in-Wonderland, the reasons things happen aren't necessarily discernible. Actions are arbitrary and only make sense from a subconscious dream state, leaving a lingering, eerie effect. After all, it's not so much the absence of logic but the introduction of an alternative logic that rattles the cages of the determinedly rational.

The production's in-jokes about actor training, puns on lines from Waiting for Godot (among other plays), analysis of Strindberg's misogyny, and the very fact of the playwright's penchant for staging dreams (see: Dream Play), make this a jocular, nutty, thoughtful and sometimes insular event. On the night I attended, the jokes were landing fitfully, leading to an effect more beguiling than funny.

Still, the meditation of what Strindberg could possibly mean to us in the here and now — as well as the meditation on what actually constitutes the here and now — retained its charm.

Katie Chidester's direction was one big reason why. Among the production's other highlights is Fred Kinney's set, a stage with a door behind it but tilted forward at a slight angle, just to make clear that even the play's architectural geometry is off-kilter. Sprouting from the stage floor are single, flowering rose stems that would have made Salvador Dali proud.