To see KICK‘s production of “Miss Julie: Sheh’mah” – the adaptation of Strindberg‘s play about sex between the upper and lower classes— I wore a two thousand dollar suit, a five hundred dollar shirt and a pair of seven hundred dollar shoes. My date wore jeans and a sweater: An ensemble that cost as much as my socks and much less than my tie.
Yet Shalome has money and no job, being a jet-setting creature of leisure and a blaxican American democrat, while I am, in everything except my politics and attire, decidedly working class. Not to mention broke and white.
These things may seem irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this blurring of social lines that makes it difficult to relate to an 1888 Swedish play about class. Just how does one render “Miss Julie” relevant to the times and land we presently live in? As radical as Strindberg’s play once was, it’s now in danger of becoming quaint.
I didn’t expect much from Classical Theatre Project’s interpretation of “The Great Gatsby.”I only hoped for good-looking actors clothed in high style.My hopes were low and they were wrong.The costumes were merely adequate and I was irritated by the length of Gatsby’s jacket sleeves throughout.But the play was well-executed by both cast and crew.More importantly, it made the right choices.
Without the press kit to inform me that FIBBER, by Theatre Gargantua, was a play intent on “exploring the slippery relationship between truth we instinctively seek and the untruth our happiness depends on” I would have never known it was about anything.
