ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Our production of After Miss Julie reunites Roundabout with several artists with whom we have a long history. The original Miss Julie was written by August Strindberg, author of The Father, the first play ever produced by the Roundabout and whose work we have continued to examine over the years. Patrick Marber, writer of our 2007 production Howard Katz (seen at the Laura Pels Theatre), scripted this new version of Strindbeg’s naturalist classic. And director Mark Brokaw is an Associate Artist whose direction here has included The Constant Wife, Suddenly Last Summer, and Distracted.

My choice to refer to Marber’s After Miss Julie as a “version” of Strindberg’s Miss Julie is quite intentional. While this play is incredibly faithful in spirit to the Swedish writer’s original, it would be wrong to call this an adaptation or a translation. The major events that transpire over the course of the play remain the same, but the backdrop against which they occur has been transformed. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Strindberg’s Miss Julie has a heated encounter with Jean, her father’s valet, in the midst of a Midsummer Eve that is being drunkenly celebrated by the servants on her family’s estate. The choices that she makes are reflective of both that period’s views on class and etiquette, as well as Strindberg’s well-documented misogyny and his own feelings of resentment toward the privileged class to which he had always felt inferior.

In Marber’s version, we move ahead several decades to 1945 and shift geographically to a country estate in England. Rather than a Midsummer Eve, we now find Miss Julie, the daughter of a Labour peer, and John, her father’s chauffer, toying with each other while the townsfolk outside cheer the surprise upset in the British elections, in which the victorious Labour party swept Winston Churchill and the Conservatives out of office. Director Mark Brokaw finds this altered milieu to be of the utmost importance to the storytelling. Marber’s Miss Julie is living on the kind of estate that has fallen out of fashion, a sort of vestige of a class system that is disintegrating, while John is exactly the kind of man on the make who can take advantage of this crucial upending of society. Mark visited several old estates that showed evidence of this period of flux, and you will see the fruits of his research in the stunning set designed by Allen Moyer. What was once a vibrant house and land, brimming with people, would, by Miss Julie’s time, have been operated by a skeleton crew. The old world was giving way to the new.

Mark also has been inspired by the timeliness of this feeling of a society on the cusp of change. In the play, the crowds outside are singing, dancing, and drinking in celebration of the regime change in which they have just taken part. Reflecting on our own election last November, it is easy to see similarities. Mark recalled seeing strangers hugging each other in the street and police observing jubilant revelers without intervening. That same energy is present in this play, and the tension that it creates between Miss Julie and John becomes a driving force for their actions.

After Miss Julie is a powerful, heated play that will certainly provoke strong reactions. I am thrilled to be working with Mark, Patrick, and our talented cast, and I hope that you will share your thoughts on their work with me.

I look forward to seeing you at the theater!

Todd Haimes