A Night of Innocent Games

It’s not inconceivable that, at some point in the American 20th century, a scenario like the one in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie could have taken place. So adaptor Weinstein deserves credit taking a whack at it with his new update. The story—that of a moneyed aristocrat’s hellion daughter so turned on by rough trade that she humiliates herself by carrying on with her father’s footman—is a bucket of suds film director Douglas Sirk could have dined out on circa 1956.

But Weinstein has inexplicably plopped down Miss Julie, and the servants who mock her, in 1991. While an unofficial caste system was certainly in place in that year of Desert Storm and Dances with Wolves, Weinstein’s decision to retain Strindberg’s Victorian language and Dennis’s all-white production don’t represent anything close to it—even if the unseen sugar-daddy aristocrat is now a Trump-like hotel magnate. And other than Proud’s armband tattoos, the only onstage element that reminds us of the early ’90s—the strange incorporation of acoustic-guitar rock numbers—disappears halfway through, before it’s had a chance to take root.

In Dennis’s bare-bones staging, the director gets highly credible performances from Proud as a canny butler with a scheme for a better life and Mendez as his conflicted fiancée. But McPhillips’s brittle, quavering Miss Julie hits too many false notes that can’t be concealed in the Side Studio’s tiny confines.—Christopher Piatt