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Commentaries on London theatre by Dartmouth students, Summer 2018

Author: Kelleen Moriarty

This is an adaptation.

It’s not actually an adaptation.

I don’t know how to write an adaptation.

I don’t know if it’s possible to adapt a play to a blog post. Especially not a play adapted from a play.

I also don’t really know what an adaptation is.

Julie, by Polly Stenham is actually an adaptation. I think. In writing this play, Stenham was striving to adapt the seminal, naturalistic play Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Strindberg, the acclaimed “father of Swedish Naturalism,” wrote Miss Julie in 1888 in Swedish. In Strindberg’s play, a story of love, sex, power, gender and class unfolds in real time onstage (and offstage) through symbolic Naturalism as Julie grapples with choices about her life in a patriarchal world and Jean uses sex and manipulation to gain personal power in a classist world.

Polly Stenham’s play is not that at all. Except that it is a little. While the general structure of the play mirrors its 130-year-old twin, Julie attempts to explore very different themes and questions. Where Strindberg interrogates class divisions, Stenham set out (and arguably failed) to illustrate issues of race and immigration in relation to economic disparity and dependency. This staging places all of the offstage sexual events center stage for a PG audience, asking the audience to believe in a consummation that they witnessed not happening. Stenham expanded the empty role of the absent father into central character motivation rather than merely circumstantial opportunity, and expanded the third character present – the other domestic worker Kristin – into a consequence and an obstacle rather than fodder for character exposition. These two characters, both rather negligible in Strindberg’s play, have groundbreaking implications for the other two characters. If, to an actor, a character is only action, motivation/objective, and obstacle, then the expansion of Kristin and the father rendered both Julie and Jean unrecognizable characters.

The main difference between these two plays, however, is the central exploration of power. In Strindberg’s play, Jean uses sex to gain power over Julie and therefore over his class-based oppressor. He demonstrates this power by decapitating Julie beloved pet bird right in front of her and coaxing her into her ultimate suicide. This is a play about power between one man and one woman. In Stenham’s play, however Jean never gains power over Julie (who instead seems to be constantly under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, and cocaine). In this play, Julie kills both her own bird and herself, without any suggestion or manipulation from Jean. This is not a play about power. It is a play about sex and trauma. It is trying to be a play about race, class, immigration, and economic frivolity. It is not a play about interpersonal power and it is not trying to be.

Is this an adaptation? Stenham’s play struggles with very different questions from Strindberg’s and poses very different themes and characters and circumstances. It has the same structural make up and the same ultimate act of tragedy (and the same names), but this is an all-together different play. Does that make it an adaptation? I’m not sure. I don’t really know what an adaptation is.

Someone once said (many someones, many onces) that there are only 12 stories in the whole world. Does that mean that every play, every book, every song, every poem is an adaptation? Is all storytelling adaptation? Are all plays just adaptations of life? That’s the point of Strindberg’s beloved Naturalism, is it not? To hold a mirror up to life and adapt it.

Episode 11: Machinal

Student 5: What a beautiful opening scene.

Student 7: Sooooo compelling.

Student 8: So delightful.

Professor: That first scene was expressionism to the nth degree.

 

Student 8: That play was 80 minutes long. Now that’s a play. No play should ever be longer than 90 minutes without a break for me to go to the loo.

 

Professor to Student 3: What did you think?

Student 3: I must say that I simply did not like it.

 

Student 7: Okay when I said I loved this play and was really excited for it, I forgot what actually happened in it…

Student 1: LOL

 

Student 5: Well it’s all about – wait do you know like the history of the play?

Student 1: No, I didn’t take 17.

Student 5: Okay cool. Well Sophie Treadwell was working as a journalist and even though she wasn’t allowed to report on it because she was a woman, she witnessed the trial of the first American woman to be executed by electric chair – Ruth Snyder – and was fascinated by the story so she wrote this play.

 

Student 4: How did they change sets so fast??

Student 2: Each episode was a fully new set all done silently as they projected the scene titles.

Student 8: Magic.

Student 6: Yeah okay that was very impressive.

Professor: I love having production-minded students in this class.

 

Student 1: Can we talk about casting?

Student 7: I just think that casting was…racially stressful.

Student 8: So stressful!

Students 1,2,4,5,6 (unison): YES

Student 3: Oh mah gahhd!

Student 8: Colorblind casting does seem to be more of a thing here.

Student 3: Yeah I feel like they’re at a different place in that conversation than we are in US theater.

Student 7: That play felt like non-Americans attempting to comment on American race relations without knowing a single thing about American race relations?

Student 5: I mean it was advertised as a commentary on pressing issues in America today.

Student 1: Excuse me??

Student 7: Wait there are A LOT of issues in America right now that we need to deconstruct and protest but I think there are MUCH better ways to do so than casting black men to play the villains in a play about a white lady. And there was even a depiction of the relationship between America and Mexico that went by fully un-commented on! There is so much horrifying, troubling stuff going on in America right now that we could comment on and do something about! In an informed way! Discussing race and identity in America is SO IMPORTANT and has to be done so much more intentionally onstage.

Student 3: Let’s talk about the way our justice system treats black men.

Student 7: Let’s talk about how the rights and liberties of the disenfranchised in America hang in the balance of the supreme court.

Student 1: Let’s talk about sexual violence and intimate partner violence.

Student 6: Let’s talk about workplace harassment.

Student 4: Let’s talk about the crisis situation between America and Mexico.

Student 5: Let’s talk about the boring patriarchy even!

Student 2: Let’s talk about something at least.

Student 3: Yeah okay also why did they have to play Wade in the Water during the execution of a white lady and then call it “an African-American Spiritual” in the closed captions when they very specifically credited each of the other song choices?

Student 8: I think that phrasing is in the script at least?

Student 5: I was bopping to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” though.

Student 8: The soundtrack was delightful.

 

Student 2: Did it really need the bright neon flashing bars of light?

Student 1: The opening moment of the subway made out of the neon lights was cool though!

Student 7: #theatreshouldbeaccessible

Student 6: All of the lighting was lit though.

 

Student 2: I don’t think the decade jump worked for me.

Student 1: What do you mean?

Student 7: Yeah what decade jumps?

Student 2: Like the concept of the production. How each episode was set in a different decade. In the script, the whole play is set in the 1920s when it was written but they staged it so each episode was a different decade leading up to now.

Student 1: Wait what?

Student 3: Oh mah gahhd.

Student 7: Wait I totally missed that. I did think the power pantsuits looked fun in that living room scene and I couldn’t figure out why they had cellphones in that other scene. I guess that does make sense.

Student 2: Yeah that was like the whole concept of the production.

 

Student 7: Okay but that was one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever seen.

Student 4: The scene in the bedroom?

Student 3: Oh yes. I heard some reaction sounds coming from that side of me in that scene and just thought “I totally agree.”

Student 6: Which scene?

Student 1: The scene in the bedroom!

Student 7: Just such a beautifully done scene!

Student 4: There wasn’t enough soliloquy or sword fighting.

Student 3: It was so beautiful and emotional and expressionistic.

Student 6: Fam, that mirror on the ceiling was lit.

 

Student 7: I think it made her a lot less sympathetic of a character. Oh man I so badly wanted to be on her side.

Student 2: I mean she did murder her husband.

Student 7: Sure, but she’s a strong women beaten down by the suffocating and oppressive patriarchal society! I wanted to root for her! I am very uncomfortable with how often I was on the side of the men.

Student 6: Have you ever been on the side of the men?

Student 8: I guess that means you’re not a feminist!

 

Student 8: I think the jumping through time thing makes it lose the whole “our lives are controlled by machines” thing because the machines kept changing.

Student 1: I just said that!

Student 7: The thing is that the idea of discussing machines running our lives is an important one! Especially today! We talk so much about how phones and computers are so so present in our lives, especially with regards to millennials and people who have grown up with the whole world of information at their fingertips.

Student 4: And then I mean I think there’s the much bigger conversation about drones and nuclear war and the role that technology has in our democracies and politics.

Student 7: It’s just such a hugely relevant topic that was handed to them with this script and they didn’t explore at all! Even in their attempts to “modernize” it.

Student 1: I just saw a play that was trying to be about women and about machines but I don’t know what it said about either of those things or how those two things interact?

Student 8: It was obviously saying that women are machines!

 

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