As students called out to each other, figuring out where to sit, director Christopher Scott gave a brief foreword to contextualize the show about to be put on. The house lights dimmed. Without costuming or set pieces, three actors brought the 1888 play “Miss Julie” to life in the Engelman Recital Hall in Baruch College’s Performing Arts Center.
Every Baruch student is required to take Great Works of Literature in order to graduate. And every semester, the Great Works program and members of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts together host The Joel Segall Great Works Reading Series.
Laura Kolb, the director of Great Works, explained that the series had started well before her time at Baruch. She isn’t sure exactly when the program started, but she knows “theater has been important to Great Works since its inception in the late 1980s.”
This semester’s selection, “Miss Julie,” was written by August Strindberg, a man so notoriously misogynistic that the director warned the audience of this before the play began.
Taking place over a single night, a wild noblewoman named Miss Julie, played by Kara Arena, entices her valet, Jean, portrayed by Amir Malaklou, into sleeping with her while his fiancée, Kristin, played by Molly Carden, sleeps. Afterward, Miss Julie and Jean spend the rest of the play desperately planning how to escape the consequences of their indiscretion.
Strindberg’s work is very concerned with class and gender, and Miss Julie’s fall from her high status.
As Kristin puts it, “that’s what happens when the gentry try to behave like the common people — they become common.”
This was a staged reading, not a full production. Empty plates were used for meals, sparkling water for beer, a box for a canary cage, and a comb for a razor.