Bad behavior always fun to watch

Jessica Austgen and Laurence Curry star in the story of a spoiled socialite and her intellectually superior footman.

By John Moore | The Denver Post

PUBLISHED: March 1, 2006 at 3:36 PM MST | UPDATED: May 8, 2016 at 5:44 AM MDT

Getting your player ready...

Colorado Springs – When someone digs up a 1980s time capsule decades from now, you have to hope that next to the important stuff like “Driving Miss Daisy,” the digger finds a videotape of “Dynasty,” just to see what the masses ate up like popcorn. “Miss Julie” is its trashy pop-culture equivalent from a century before. It’s racy, lusty and so very, “Oh no she didn’t!”

August Strindberg is considered one of Sweden’s most important writers, but through today’s prism, he’s Danielle Steel: Erotic, scandalous, and so much fun. What he can’t be considered anymore is immediate. Except perhaps in the sense that watching campy, bad sexual behavior is always popular.

“Miss Julie” was written in 1888, but while never overtly specified, TheatreWorks director Murray Ross appears to have moved the story of an exhibitionistic young artistocrat back several decades to an American slave plantation. While the unseen Count is away, this cat will play.

Daughter Julie is a bored, boozy young socialite who enjoys shocking party guests by dancing with her servant. But Ross’ Jean is a black footman who happens to be more well-

read than his boss, and therefore is more than her intellectual equal. Their banter leads to a scandalous, unromantic tryst, followed by a Chekhovian overnight of pure purgatory.

Strindberg is primarily concerned with issues of class and economic distinction, which Ross amps up exponentially by introducing the race card. There is never a sense these two are ever falling in love. Instead this is a chess match in which the behavior is bad and the power constantly shifts.

Many equate Miss Julie to Nora or Hedda, creations of Strindberg’s Norwegian pal Henrik Ibsen (“A Doll’s House,” “Hedda Gabbler”). Both wrote about women suffocating in their Victorian societies, though Julie is nowhere near as complex as Nora or Hedda. She’s more a Scarlett O’Hara with a kind of spoiled chutzpah. She’s crazy, volatile and even menstrual (yep – there’s one scene not for the faint of heart).

Julie was once terrifically described as “more of an energy field than an actual character.” Taking on this monstrous challenge is Jessica Austgen, who has at last found a part worthy of the dramatic talents she first revealed in the Aurora Fox’s “Last Train to Nibroc” three years ago. Her Julie is a petulant wild child, filled with sexual energy and contradiction. Jean is a toy to kiss her boot, a means to an end, perhaps, but never an object of real desire.

And yet Austgen, with sadness and anger intermingling in her eyes, manages in the play’s lickety-split 80 minutes to finally evoke a pathetic kind of sympathy. All the more impressive considering Strindberg was a legendary misogynist.

Austgen’s sparring partner is Laurence Curry, a consistently outstanding young actor who does his level best with some stilted language and a character arc so audacious, his behavior doesn’t start to ring false until you’re halfway back to Denver.

Here, in this setting, this literate servant begins as much a slave to propriety as to Julie. But by the end, it is Jean playing our poor little rich girl like a marionette. Naturalistic? No. Appropriate? Hardly. But terrifically acted, and fun to watch despite some laugh-out-loud dialogue (“You think I loved you because my womb craved your seed?!”).

Ross is the dean of theater in southern Colorado. The guy has been around so long I swear he does some stuff just to mess with you. This time his game board is his set design. The action takes place entirely in the Count’s kitchen – which is pristine save for leaves strewn all about the floor. Now, not only are we indoors, but it’s not even fall – it’s midsummer’s eve. And Strindberg was a strict realist. It’s as if Ross has set out his game pieces and said, “OK, just try and figure that one out!” My guess is this is all just a visual pun – for every character has in some way fallen hard.

In the end, “Miss Julie” doesn’t have the authenticity or staying power to evoke the same kind of emotional clout as “Hedda Gabbler,” though both plays end nearly identically. Only here there’s little room for debate what fate awaits poor Miss Julie beyond that door.

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

*** | “Miss Julie”

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