A Touch of Class, Strindberg Style

The world has gone mad and we are all of it. What's worse is we made it that way. Or at least, that's the way of the world according to the master Swedish dramatist, August Strindberg. In truly modernist fashion, the world of August Strindberg's experimental masterpiece, Miss Julie, now playing with the Coyote Theater at the Boston Center for the Arts, is a world where people search to create their own destinies out of the shards of the civilization left behind and the pitiful results of past human choices. In the preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg claims that he "finds the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles," and Miss Julie portrays a struggle in perhaps the most violent tradition of the 1880s: the heartless struggle between the classes.

The play presents three characters, all tragically flawed in their individual searches for love and happiness. Miss Julie, played by the vibrant and sympathetic Stephanie Dorian, is a coy, sensual and ultimately tragically shamed figure, an aristocratic young woman struggling to find love among family and servants, who learns the hard way that class barriers are cold, heartless walls not easily crossed. On the other side of the class wall are Miss Julie's two servants, Jean and Kristine, played by Diego Arciniagas and Susanne Nitter. Jean and Kristine innocently believe that in their love for each other they may transcend the misery of their class.

In the course of the play, however, both predictably learn that degradation is not so easily overcome. Arciniagas infests Jean with the great passion of Strindberg's typical heroic, mythical, self-willed man. Yet along with this determination, Arciniagas recognizes Jean's uncanny brutality and sorrow as he yearns for a sky that he can't reach, a yearning that ultimately leads to a climactic confrontation with his mistress. Only through violence does Jean transcend Miss Julie. Only by degrading her into little more than a whore (through graphic directorial choices leading to a violent, on-stage rape scene that must have Strindberg rolling in his grave) does he forcibly climb above her. And, similarly, only through this unbearable shame does Miss Julie ironically fulfill her wish to travel down from her precarious perch in the pure and untouchable upper crust. Only Kristine truly understands the hypocrisy inherent in Julie and Jean's desires, yet she can do and say nothing. Nitter deftly underplays Kristine, suggesting that beneath Kristine's humble demeanor burns the rage and frustration of a woman trapped within a servile, unfair world.

The production design aptly showcases the precarious and frighteningly real world of Miss Julie. Costume designer Clint Ramo's accurate and beautiful 1880s costumes, complete with exaggerated bustles and full livery, highlight the importance of external appearance to class distinction, while set designer Susan Roger's hybrid set is itself perfectly unsettled somewhere between abstraction and reality. The smells of real onstage cooking mingle with a spare room composed of strangely angled linoleum and frighteningly high stacks of porcelain dinner plates.

Together with the intimate, black box theater, the set produces an unreal sense of being trapped within a slippery world where everything is dangerous and unstable. Although, in the end, a few overly strong directorial choices mar an otherwise subtle and beautiful production, director Jeffrey Mousseau and his fine cast and crew for the most part present a disturbing and moving rendition of Strindberg's masterpiece. If you've never ventured beyond the hallowed halls of Harvard to check out Boston's theater scene, consider looking to the Coyote Theater's production of Miss Julie for an intimate and startling introduction.