Theater
THEATER REVIEW
Things That Didn’t Happen in ‘Miss Julie’
‘Bastards of Strindberg,’ Four Short Plays at the Lion
Bastards of Strindberg, whose cast includes, from left, Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz, Rikke Lylloff and Albert Bendix, is at the Lion Theater.
SARA KRULWICH / THE NEW YORK TIMES
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
SEPTEMBER 5, 2014
A staple of the theater is deconstructed, reconstructed, teased or rewritten through the sensibilities of four different writers in “Bastards of Strindberg,” a collection of short plays inspired by “Miss Julie,” being presented at the Lion Theater by theScandinavian American Theater Company. August Strindberg’s heated drama about the combustion that occurs when a footman and a count’s daughter spend a tempestuous night together has remained surprisingly present on both stage and screen. A new film version with Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell is due soon, and a South African production was acclaimed when it played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2012. Now the play has been put under a refracting lens by two Swedish writers, Lina Ekdahl and Andreas Boonstra, and two Americans, David Bar Katz and Dominique Morisseau.
All four plays have their intriguing aspects, although, for me, the most engaging was Ms. Morisseau’s “High Powered,” directed by Henning Hegland, which moves furthest from the source material and doesn’t even include the character of Julie. Nevertheless, her presence hangs heavily in the air as Mya (Zenzele Cooper), Julie’s dog walker, and Mya’s boyfriend, Darrin (Kwasi Osei), the chauffeur to Julie and her rich father, pack up her belongings in boxes for Julie’s move across the country.
The time is, obviously, today, and Ms. Morisseau’s work suggests that little has changed in the world, in terms of rigid divisions between class, since Strindberg wrote the play in 1888. “Thing is,” as Mya puts it, “most of the 1 don’t never see the potential in the 99. We be like there to do all the buildings, and they get to walk through a door or look out a window and never think about what’s holding those bricks together.”
Darrin, however, has managed to capture the attention and respect of his boss and his boss’s daughter. With Julie’s endorsement, he’s gotten an entry-level job at Daddy’s company, an investment house. Mr. Osei brings a simmering intensity to his performance that suggests how fervently Darrin desires to break out of the world he was born into. He bristles angrily at Mya’s street slang and rigorously corrects her grammar.
Ms. Cooper is also excellent as Mya, who may not be a math genius like her boyfriend, but knows that something about his sudden ascension doesn’t quite add up. Eventually, she asks the loaded question “So what make you visible?” The intimation, which riles Darrin to the point of violence, is that even with his gifts, it is only because of an intimate relationship with Julie that he has been given a leg up. Mr. Katz’s “Chanting Hymns to Fruitless Moons,” directed by Alicia Dhyana House, reimagines a brighter fate for Julie, who walks offstage with a razor at the conclusion of the original play, with suicide in her disordered mind. In Mr. Katz’s revision, Julie (Vanessa Johansson) begins by flirting with John (Devin B. Tillman) on Midsummer’s Eve, just as in the Strindberg. (He’s Jean in that version.)
But after a strange ritual in which Julie pledges allegiance to the gods John worships, Julie is granted a vision of the future. She sees an older version of herself (a wry Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz), who matter-of-factly tells her younger self that the end John has ordained for her — death by her own hand — can be avoided. “I have come to save you from that fate,” she says, and under the older Julie’s tutelage, the young one proceeds to take violent revenge on John for his manipulation.
Both plays by the Swedish writers, coincidentally or not, are more experimental. Ms. Ekdahl’s “Midsummer at ‘Tyrolen,’ ” directed by Mr. Hegland, takes place in the run-down restaurant of the title, sometime in the late 20th or early 21st century. (Or so the brief playing of the immortally awful “The Safety Dance,” by Men Without Hats, would suggest.) The restaurant, the stand-in for the kitchen of the original, is owned by Julie’s father. Here, Julie (Rikke Lylloff) sits around, doing nothing much, while Jean (Albert Bendix) and Kristin (Ms. Kullberg-Bendz) work. Attempting to rouse her from her torpor — or laziness — Jean implores Julie to join him in his ambition to start a trucking business.
As they discuss this plan and the complexities of the relationships among the three of them, the actors step outside the characters to narrate their thoughts or annotate the story. (“Kristin longs to get away,” “Henning is Julie’s pet ermine.”) Unfortunately, the desultory dialogue and almost somnambulistic mien of the characters drains the energy from the proceedings, so that it’s hard to care much whether this limp threesome will work up the courage to escape their dead-end lives.
“The Truth About Froken Julie,” written by Mr. Boonstra and directed by Ms. House, comically interrogates some of the details of Strindberg’s play. A guitar-strumming Jean (Drew O’Kane) is accused by Julie (Ms. Johansson) and Kristin (Ms. Lylloff) of spewing forth lies every time he opens his mouth.
“One of my favorites is that you claimed to have been going to France on and off with the count to buy wine,” Kristin carps. “When would that have happened? Or did you go while I was sleeping? I’m quite a heavy sleeper, as you all know.” (Amusingly, the actors who are not performing are often seen nodding off in the background, in another allusion to the unlikely deep sleep that Strindberg’s Kristine falls into at a crucial moment in the original.) From here, the play proper proceeds to disintegrate, although Mr. Boonstra’s deconstruction becomes a little messy, and less funny, as it grinds to a rather stale metatheatrical conclusion. Julie steps forward and flatly tells us, “You know the rest.” Julie and Jean have sex. “Regret it, blah, blah, blah. And then I kill myself. Applause. The thing I have a problem with in theater is when we try to make this unreal fantasy-thing as close to real as possible.”
Jean, or Mr. O’Kane, then asks, “But is it even possible to be really true onstage?” The thing I have a problem with in theater is when tired rhetorical questions like that start being hurled at the audience.
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