By Laura Zornosa
We hear the tension before we see it: Enter Chicago’s Court Theatre and discordant ambient sound swells. Then Miss Julie begins, and now we see the tension, too, before a word is spoken. Blue and violet spotlights overhead pulsate and rove as the sound transforms into harsh techno. The cook, Kristine, kneads bread in the kitchen of a country estate.
Swedish playwright August Strindberg (a misogynist who described the title character as halvkvinnan man-hataren or a “man-hating half-woman”) certainly didn’t imagine this opening when Miss Julie premiered in 1889. So how do you update a 137-year-old classic without changing the setting? The Court Theatre, led by director Gabrielle Randle-Bent with Harry G. Carlson’s adaptation, accomplishes this brilliantly.
Not every door is an exit
The aristocratic Miss Julie (Mi Kang) wants to escape suffocating societal expectations, just as her servant, Jean (Kelvin Roston Jr.), seeks to rise through the ranks toward freedom. As the cook, Kristine (Rebecca Spence) has an even lower status than Jean; the sound (Willow James) and lighting (Keith Parham) underscore the friction of her labor.
Why do we keep coming back to this play? In the program, Spence recalls a conversation with the director: “We still can’t deal with actual class issues: talking about that yearning to rise, or—in the case of the people who have risen—their guilt about it and how they utilize the privilege at their fingertips.”
Casting by Becca McCracken with Celeste M. Cooper makes the play more relevant: Kristine is played by a white woman, her character working to ensure that Miss Julie and Jean can’t escape, that the class order remains intact. Julie, the daughter of a feminist commoner and a Count, is positioned here as the model minority. And Jean, played by a Black man, strives to work his way out of the class order (given added weight by Court Theatre’s Hyde Park neighborhood).
The trio interacts inside the centerpiece of scenic designer John Culbert’s gorgeous vision, a cylinder of voile scrim, rimmed with bars of hanging herbs. Trapped inside a beautiful birdcage built of class and status, their fates become inextricably linked. Miss Julie walks toward an ending this production suggests was never fate but social architecture.
Is ‘Miss Julie’ worth seeing?
4 out of 5 stars
A stunning, smartly reframed production that finds new fault lines in an old classic—Court Theatre’s Miss Julie makes Strindberg’s tension feel completely, uncomfortably ours.
- Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago
- Notable performers: Mi Kang, Kelvin Roston Jr., Rebecca Spence
- Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission
- Performances through March 8, 2026
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