Santa Barbara Theater Brings Miss Julie to Center Stage
With Miss Julie, August Strindberg made one of the most exciting and volatile contributions to the repertoire in the long history of the theater. In the manifesto with which he prefaced the play, Strindberg set out some extraordinary requirements for the new theater of “naturalism” he had in mind: no footlights, no stage makeup, events happening in real time, absolute candor about such socially awkward subjects as blasphemy, lust, and various bodily functions, and, finally, the creation and depiction of the naturalist character-a kind of amalgam of the tragic hero and the protagonist of the 19th-century novel-a complex person with even more complex motives.
