MISSISSIPPI BURNING
Disturbing new play moves 'Miss Julie' from Sweden to American South
By TED MILLS
Bathed in Mississippi heat and sweat, Stephen Sachs' free adaptation of August Strindberg's "Miss Julie," which opened Friday at Center Stage Theater, maintains its hellish battles of class and gender, but makes us look at the play with fresh eyes.
The South during the Civil Rights Era may be worlds away from Strindberg's chilly Sweden, but Mr. Sachs knows exactly how far back he needs to go in this country's history to find the equivalent of 19th century Europe: not that far, in fact.
The original play followed the daughter of a count who falls from her broken engagement to a local official into a night of flirting with one of her household servants, even while the fiancé of the servant sleeps upstairs. Strindberg, a child of privilege who was nonetheless unsettled about his position within his class, understood the power plays that happen between the classes and how social strata make prisoners of their inhabitants.
But Mr. Sachs adds to the play the extra dimension of race. Miss Julie (Tracy Middendorf) is now an unstable siren in a red dress, drenched in sweat from dancing in the servants' barn all night during Fourth of July festivities. After all, who is to stop her? Certainly not John (Chuma Gault), her father's chauffeur, who arrives back in his quarters slightly drunk and trying to hide his attraction to the wild woman with disparaging comments in her absence to Christine (Judith Moreland). The exhausted and put-upon cook of the house, Christine believes somehow that she and John will get married, and is already preparing for a life of forgiving John for his trespasses. She knows John can only fend off Miss Julie's drunken advances so much, but she also believes that a culture that will gladly lynch a man for looking at a white woman the wrong way will keep some horrific balance.
All the while, the newspapers and the radio hint at the big changes underway in the North -- the Civil Rights Act has just been signed -- but Christine and John know that enforcement is a different matter.
Mr. Sachs' view of a world in flux, which frightens but excites the play's three characters, nicely links to the world of Strindberg in the decade before revolution hit Europe. (There are, unsurprisingly, hints of Chekhov here, too, and the sweaty setting reeks of Tennessee Williams, who found inspiration for "A Streetcar Named Desire" in the psychological traps of Strindberg. What goes around . . .)
Miss Julie soon arrives and continues her flirtation with John, first while Christine nods off in a chair, and then when she leaves for her own abode. Most of "Miss Julie" flirts and taunts us the same way, placing two desperate characters together in a room and ratcheting up the heat, sexual and otherwise. Both want to dominate the other: Miss Julie wants to reassert the privileges that she feels are her birthright, whether she does so because she can or because she knows she soon can't is a different matter. John's lust is a mixture of hate and desire, revenge against all those who currently repress him, but also a reaching out to a better society he feels is being created without him, somewhere far off.
But Mr. Sachs and actor Ms. Middendorf also understand Miss Julie as a dangerous bipolar personality, capable of ecstatic highs and bloody lows that wreak havoc on John's status and logic.
Ms. Middendorf performs a brilliant high-wire act in this show, which comes to Santa Barbara after a hit run at Los Angeles' Fountain Theatre. Her Miss Julie is a car crash in slow motion, taking several bystanders with her. The character clings to the actor like her damp, clinging dress of blood red, in a performance that is close to possessed. (Saturday night's show reminded me of a comment once made by a theater director: "Anybody can get a standing ovation. What's hard is getting a gasp from the audience." Needless to say, there were more than a few gasps.)
Mr. Gault's John not only looks, but feels, like a person of his time -- as if he's stepped out of a photograph from a Civil Rights march -- although John remains ambivalent toward the events surrounding him until necessity forces him into some desperate decision-making. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where John goes wrong in his choices, but even in the end, it's understandable how Christine can still tolerate such a man. Her final actions reveal the thread that links all the characters' fates -- piles of money and who controls it.
With lovely set design by Travis Gale Lewis, and sound design by Dave Marling that submerges the theater in a world of night insects and far-off revelry, "Miss Julie" is deeply satisfying, even while it unsettles.