Marie Schulte
Jean (David Sapiro) and Miss Julie (Kelsey Yudice) kindle a scandalous affair while Christine (Cricket Gage) looks on.
A group of gaily dressed Swedish peasants played music, danced around a May pole and picked flowers in full celebration of the Midsummer holiday as the audience filed in to see Fermat’s Last Theater Company’s production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in the Fredric March Play Circle in the Memorial Union, running through Aug. 8. Among the traditionally clad, barefoot servants dancing schottisches, the senator’s daughter, Miss Julie, seems out of place in a beautiful blue gown and black leather boots. The mistress of the estate after the death of her mother, it is clear that Julie (Kelsey Yudice) enjoys transgressing boundaries, particularly on this night of revels when the world is seemingly turned upside down.
Julie’s behavior is both fascinating and vexing for the senator’s valet, Jean (David Sapiro). She is at once an aristocrat who doesn’t know her place, a beautiful young woman with a twisted understanding of relationships and a bored 25 year-old with delusions of sexual equality, put into her head by her progressive but vengeful mother. She uses the power of her position to manipulate and humiliate men, including her former fiancé, and does not seem to understand the consequences that could — and ultimately do — ensue.
When Julie turns her fickle attention to Jean, she is immediately overmatched. The cold, calculating son of a farmhand has risen to a prime position as a house servant through his Machiavellian scheming. Jean has designs on much more than a sexual encounter with Julie — at the very least he will strip her of her power, at most he will use her and her money to flee the estate and start his own hotel, perhaps even buying a gentleman’s title in Romania.
Miss Julie is often described as a battle of the sexes with a healthy dose of class warfare thrown in. In his substantial prologue to the play, Strindberg stated that he wanted to explore naturalism (definitely eschewing happy endings), expose the ridiculous notion that women could ever be men’s equals and assert that the class system that had been in place for generations was finished. In this new style he avoided giving his characters long speeches, but instead “made my figures vacillating, out of joint, torn between the old and the new,” and Fermat’s production bears that out. The frantic exchanges between Julie and Jean that fill most of the play feel like a ping-pong match where neither player has any idea what the next move will be. The result is a muddle of arguments, which director Aliza Feder did little to frame.
Overall, the tension inherent in the drama isn’t fulfilled. As Jean, David Sapiro has a commanding presence that never falters. He easily overwhelms his mistress physically and verbally throughout the play. With calculated ruthlessness he dispatches Miss Julie to her pathetic end as quickly as he deals with her inconvenient pet bird. Without a chink in Jean’s armor, Julie’s threats and protestations don’t land convincingly. Only his fear of the senator’s rebuke seems real.
As his sparring partner, Yudice portrays Julie as a spoiled brat instead of a woman who enjoys taunting others with the power of her money and social position. Her character’s immaturity undercuts her ability to seduce Jean. Instead, it feels like Julie is playing a child’s game where she doesn’t understand the rules. Her emotional outbursts seem like tantrums from a girl who has made a series of bad decisions: staying up all night, drinking too much and going to bed with the wrong man.
Fermat’s Last Theater Company’s mission is to present stories about social justice. This production underscores how laudable and difficult this goal is.