"Miss Julie" by The Hypocrites on January 24, 2008

Members of the Hypocrites joke that they do two kinds of plays: talkie plays and walkie plays. Talkie plays, as you might guess, have a lot of dialogue. Last season, they did an extraordinary production of Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano." It didn't feel very talkie but I suppose it was. This production of August Strindberg's 1888 play is a walkie play. One walks around the set to view the play. Whether a walkie or a talkie play, one can usually count on seeing plays with extraordinary scripts done with intelligent interpretations of those scripts. Sean Graney, the artistic director of the company, directs the majority of the productions and his understanding and translations of the plays to the stage are among the smartest I ever encounter.

Strindberg is considered the father or modern theater. With "Miss Julie," he set out to ignite a revolution in theater by writing a naturalistic play. These days, though, naturalism is the status quo in theater and Graney, who directed this production, is interested in igniting his own revolution by shifting us away from it. His admiration for the writing, though, leads him to present very careful and smart interpretations of the plays. In a way, a director always co-authors a play when producing it, by cutting scenes or adding dialogue, making certain design choices, or emphasizing certain points of view in the script over others. In this production, Graney seems to do that even more than is typical and it is fun to witness it. In a way, this production is a deconstruction (and I'm not using that word when I should be saying analysis) of theater and a lesson in theater history. I don't know enough about Strindberg to know if he had intended to do the same with his play 120 years ago. As a modernist, that might very well have been the case.

"Miss Julie" is about an aristocratic woman who gives in to her lust for a servant and causes an upheaval of the roles of the aristocracy and the servants. When the play opens, Miss Julie has used her father's absence as an opportunity to dance with the servants. As she plays with her father's coachman, Jean, making him kiss her feet, her hands, and dance with her, he gets aroused and eventually they have sex. Miss Julie becomes somewhat melodramatic, wanting Jean to assure her that he loves her (although they both know that neither of them loves the other). Jean at first tries to protect himself by convincing her that what she is doing is unseemly but once he realizes he's unable to stop her, he uses the situation to make life better for himself: he tries to get her to finance a new hotel that he would start and eventually leads her to kill herself. He knows that as long as the master calls, he'll have to say "Yes, sir" and go to him and tries to escape that life and then just to save his job. The third character, Kristin, is the cook and Jean's betrothed. She wants to keep things they way they are, with the aristocracy out of reach and something to admire. She knows that they know too little because they never work but she believes that social order must be kept. Thus, while Miss Julie and Jean are crossing boundaries, Kristin is trying to maintain them.

Graney deconstructs the play through the audience's physical experience of it. He adds a singing chorus of sorts, and they sing about what is happening in the play and guide us through the space. In the middle of the room is a large box with wooden paneling. Each of the four sides says 4th, as in 4th wall. The audience walks to the farthest side from the entrance for the first act and the wall opens up to reveal a kitchen, where the first scene will unfold. We then move to another side, where Miss Julie opens a wall and the bar is inside. Eventually, the entire box is opened and the audience is invited to sit within it to watch the final act. I was less than two feet from the actors at certain points. The costumes early in the play were fairly contemporary. By the final scene, we've moved backward in theater history and the costumes look like those that might have been used in an 1888 production or a contemporary production that chose to set it in 1888. They also all match; they're the same style, fabric, and shade of green. When in that final scene Kristin tell Jean that his clothes look ridiculous, it's a funny joke about theater productions. His clothes look ridiculous because he's no longer wearing jeans but is now in a coachman's outfit from 1888 and because it's green and matches her dress. The production also begins with a contemporary setting of the play, bringing Strindberg's script up to 2008, but as it moves ahead, it moves backward in time and ends in an 1888 production. As a concept, it's by far one of the most clever sets I've seen. 

When the play isn't being referential, it's less of a success for me but I'm not certain why. The script is dense and dense scripts are difficult because if your mind wanders for a minute you lose something important. Still, I feel like I "got" the story. Maybe the performances weren't always clear. The timing of the dialogue was steady and fast and the actor who played Jean wasn't always convincing within those constraints. There were times when he was excellent but not in all scenes. Both women were compelling and maintaining such intensity must be difficult to pull off when you're in such close proximity to the audience. Unlike "Mud," another walkie play that was unsurpassed, the stylized acting didn't manage to breakthrough to have an emotional impact on me. When Jean drips blood on Miss Julie's neck, telling us about the suicide about to come, I loved it for it's referential nature but was not moved to be sad for what was about to happen. 

I, for one, do believe that theater artists are creating new forms of theater, with "Hey, Girl" as an excellent example, even if the mainstream theater companies like the Goodman and Steppenwolf are not producing them. The Hypocrites are going in a different direction. They still focus on conventional scripts and create new things out of them. It's some of the very best theater in Chicago and is something to be seen.