Don’t be fooled by the title.
“Miss Julie,” which The Rogue Theatre opens this weekend, sounds like a sweet, genteel story.
It is not.
The August Strindberg play boils with class wars, sex, power struggles and despair.
“It is so elemental,” Director Cynthia Meier says. “Every moment in the play is about power and who has the power. It’s primarily between the upper and lower classes, and the sexual power between men and women. It’s those dynamics — sex and class.”
The background
Strindberg had the censors clamoring to shut the play down when he first staged it in 1888 as the premiere production of his new theater, The Scandinavian Naturalistic Theatre. Strindberg skirted the censors by opening it at the Copenhagen University rather than the theater.
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At the time, the playwright was enchanted with naturalistic theater — the story had to be simple and rooted in reality, have characters with rich interior lives and whose actions are organic to their social stature, and the issues and conflicts must have life-changing consequences.
“There’s something very elegant and primal about the simplicity and structure of the play,” says Meier.
The story
Miss Julie is the daughter of a count who is drawn to her father’s valet — a big taboo given the vast difference between their classes. She feels imprisoned by her social status and by her gender. She and the valet, Jean, flirt and tumble into bed and make plans to flee away together and open a hotel. Of course, it’s the 1800s — it can never be. She is not above lording her power as a woman and an aristocrat over Jean, and he is not above treating her gruffly. The 90-minute play takes place on Midsummer’s Eve at her father’s estate.
“It’s interesting to watch these two characters do this dance,” says Meier. “At times they are flirtatious and sexy, and other times full of hatred and disdain because of the differences of social class. I think the play is pretty riveting in that regard.”
Misogyny anyone?
Strindberg made no secret of his disdain for women, and it becomes abundantly clear in his long and often astonishing preface to this play.
“Miss Julie is a modern character, not because the man-hating half-woman may not have existed in all ages, but because now, after her discovery, she has stepped to the front and begun to make a noise,” he wrote. “The half-woman is a type coming more and more into prominence, selling herself nowadays for power, decorations, distinctions, diplomas, as formerly for money, and the type indicates degeneration.”
But Meier doesn’t see that disparaging view of women in “Miss Julie.”
“I don’t find this particular play misogynistic,” she says. “I think the two characters are equal; they are equal sparring partners.”
Besides, she says, she doesn’t put a lot of weight into Strindberg’s preface. “I’ve read a lot about Strindberg. He says all kinds of things about what he’s trying to say, and I don’t believe any of it.”
128 years old, and still fresh
“It’s amazing how this play written (almost) 130 years ago can still speak to us about what it means to be on the top, or the bottom,” says Meier. “He has articulated it very well, and put it in front of us in a profound way.”
And in the end …
Meier’s hope is audiences will leave the play “thinking about class differences and how they show up in our own lives,” she says. “Some will think she’s a spoiled brat, and others will have tremendous empathy for her. But like all good plays, it gives us an opportunity to reflect on our own lives.”
