Displaying items by tag: Gabrielle RandleBent
Court Theatre’s Miss Julie Sacrifices Proximity for Concept
There is something almost perversely apt about staging Miss Julie inside a birdcage.
Under the direction of Gabrielle Randle-Bent, August Strindberg’s most celebrated chamber play, Miss Julie—an autopsy of class warfare disguised as seduction—arrives at Court Theatre in a production as conceptually bold as it is frustratingly self-defeating. Scenic designer John Culbert places the entire action within a giant birdcage veiled in scrim. The metaphor is unmistakable: these three characters are trapped—by class, by gender, by desire, by the invisible architecture of hierarchy. Within this enclosure they circle one another warily, predator and prey trading positions until collision becomes combustion.
And yet, the scrim that literalizes Strindberg’s thesis also undermines the very essence of chamber drama.
Chamber plays depend on proximity. They require that we see the flicker of doubt before it becomes cruelty, the calculation before it becomes command. The scrim, however gauzy, creates a barrier. We are not fully privy to the faces or the minute mental machinations of the actors. Instead of sitting in the kitchen with them, breathing the same charged air, we observe as though through glass. The concept imprisons not only the characters but the audience.
Still, the performances press fiercely against those confines.
Mi Kang’s Miss Julie is volatile and wounded, her aristocratic arrogance masking a desperate hunger for annihilation. She plays Julie not as a naïve romantic but as a woman testing the edges of her own destruction. Kelvin Roston Jr.’s Jean is taut with ambition. His Jean calculates even while seducing; every flirtation carries the weight of social ascent. The push and pull between Kang and Roston Jr. has genuine danger, their exchanges tightening like wire.
Rebecca Spence’s Kristine, meanwhile, anchors the production with moral steadiness. Kristine is the quiet witness to the carnage—a woman whose survival depends on understanding the rules rather than challenging them.
Kelvin Roston Jr. and Mi Kang in Miss Julie at Court Theatre.
The uncredited score becomes an unexpected fourth character. It begins with what sounds like a restrained string quartet—orderly, almost classical—before devolving into ear-piercing, disconnected, harsh chords. The progression feels deliberate: a descent into madness mirroring Julie’s psychological unraveling. It is invasive, unsettling, and impossible to ignore.
Raquel Adorno’s costumes subtly delineate class distinctions without ostentation. Fabric and silhouette do the quiet work of social architecture. No detail feels accidental.
This may well be Strindberg’s season in Chicago. Across town, Steppenwolf Theatre Company is mounting The Dance of Death, another of the playwright’s bruising dissections of intimacy and entrapment. That two major companies are wrestling simultaneously with Strindberg’s merciless worldview suggests a cultural appetite for dramas in which love is war and escape is illusion.
Court Theatre’s Miss Julie, guided by Gabrielle Randle-Bent’s disciplined direction, understands that these characters are caged long before the lights rise. The tragedy is that the scrim—meant to emphasize their confinement—keeps us from fully experiencing the suffocating intimacy that makes the play detonate. Strindberg wrote this as chamber music for three instruments. When we cannot quite see the musicians’ fingers on the strings, some of the music is inevitably lost.
Even so, the production lingers. Like the final discordant notes of its score, it vibrates with unease long after the cage goes dark.
RECOMMENDED
When: through March 8th
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $60 - $90.00 Student, Group and military discounts available
773-753-4472
This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com.
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