Kelvin Roston Jr., Mi Kang, and Rebecca Spence Photo by Michael Brosilow

The story unfolds over the course of a Midsummer Evening and the following morning. Kristine and Jean, both servants to the Count, are engaged. Although Kristine embraces the social order and her role within it, Jean is both anxious to elevate his own status and fascinated by the daughter of the household, Miss Julie. For her part, Miss Julie has just recently either suffered a broken engagement or broken it off herself, depending on whose version of events the audience is to believe.

Either because it is in character for her or as a reaction to the dissolution of her relationships, Miss Julie inserts herself into the servants' Midsummer festivities, dancing with various members of the staff, and particularly with Jean. She pursues him as he returns to the kitchen and, after copious drinking and verbal sparring, the two end up having sex and destroying the kitchen in the course of it.

Before sunrise, they come to their senses sufficiently to realize that, despite their mutual desire to break out of the social classes that constrain them, their liaison has simply destabilized their statuses, stripping them of whatever protections they might have had without actually altering where they fit within this rigid reality. Kristine returns long enough to resolve to leave the household, as she sees Miss Julie as having irrevocably debased herself, and to thwart Jean and Miss Julie's half-formed, cynical plans to flee the Count's household before their secret can be discovered.

Strindberg's original ending is abrupt and ambiguous, with Jean "ordering" Julie to leave the house, presumably to kill herself. Court's version takes this a step further, having Jean cut Julie's throat, only to see her "rise" and seemingly mix herself the abortifacient tea she'd had Kristine brew up earlier in response to her personal dog "mixing" with the barn dogs.

John Culbert's scenic design is quite gorgeous and captures the paradox of the dreamy, liminal temporal setting and the close confines of the "downstairs" spaces of a grand home, but it has limitations in terms of how functional it is. The irregular, naturalistic footprint of the stage is enormous, as the thrust pushes well past what becomes the proscenium in other productions. But much of that space is given over to plants and the suggestion of water surrounding the circular space of Kristine's kitchen, which is enclosed in a floor-to-ceiling net that evokes the cage of the greenfinch Julie is intent on bringing with her as she flees her father's home.

This space is almost exclusively where the characters interact. It is crowded with a huge, old-fashioned stove, a large, sturdy table, and various shelves. Although this cluttered, claustrophobic feel is certainly appropriate to the space servants such as Kristine would occupy (and more broadly suggests how little opportunity for agency any of these characters as), it leaves the actors very little room to move in, particularly after multiple instances of characters knocking various kitchen items to the floor. Throughout, the actors often either trip over these or find themselves having to kick out of the way. Moreover, the floor itself is often quite distractingly loud, particularly as Miss Julie scuffs along in the flat sandals she's donned to complete her "commoner" look for the festivities.

Raquel Adorno's costumes work well with the impressive visuals of the set. Miss Julie's flowing white peasant dress, with its red accents and soiled hem, reflects the gender and class confusion of the character's upbringing. In contrast, what Kristine wears when she is on the job is functional, but meticulously neat and clean, whereas her Sunday clothes are smart but understated, as befits a woman who not only accepts her place in the social order, but embraces it. For Jean's part, it is drily funny to see the lone male character as the one who struggles into and out of various prescribed costumes. Moreover, the baseline of white breeches with braces and a white undershirt suggests the man's tendency to think of himself as a blank canvas, always ready to paint himself (or be painted) in some new light, as the situation demands.

Keith Parham's lighting and particularly Willow James's sound are uncharacteristically weak in this production. Parham's more traditional lighting, which prevails for most of the show, is effective on the whole as it moves the action along in "real time." But the "bird cage" part of the set is surrounded individual bulbs, set in a grid. At a handful of points, including the opening, during the sex scene, and nearer the end of the show, these flash in sequences reminiscent of a rock arena show.

These moments are paired with loud, abrasive techno music that seems an odd choice, given the play's reputation for being the height of naturalism. At the top of the show, there is a stretch of this music and strobing lights that goes on far too long, as Kristine quite literally goes through all the steps necessary to create a bread dough and do the initial knead and punch down of it before setting it in the warming oven. This music then pulls back until there is just the faintest suggestion of thumping bass that runs throughout most of the rest of the show. Although it seems intended to evoke the party going on in the barn, the sound level is so low that it seemed for a long time that it was simply bass-heavy music playing not in the theater, but somewhere nearby. Whatever the intentions might have been for this sound design, it simply doesn't land.

In terms of the performances, all three actors give good performances, but the direction does not quite gel. As Miss Julie, Mi Kang is dreamy, frantic, and ferocious by turns. Kang is unafraid to own the fact that the character is self-involved and dabbling in the world of Jean and Kristine in ways that are oblivious and dangerous to them. Yet she finds moments of vulnerability that keep the character from being entirely unsympathetic, which is an accomplishment given that it's questionable whether Strindberg had any sympathy for her.

Rebecca Spence's performance as Kristine is much more grounded and tuned into the rhythms of Strindberg's language and interpersonal dynamics. Spence's Kristine is immediately appealing and she taps so effortlessly into the humor and frustration that this character experiences as she navigates the clear structures of class hierarchy and the more chaotic territory of Jean's ambitions that one almost forgets that it is this character who is arguing in favor of the brutal status quo.

The performances of both actors are interesting and clearly purposeful, but they don't seem to exist on the same canvas. Certainly there's intention there, as the characters functionally exist in different but interlocking structural realities. However, the direction doesn't quite bring those realities together on the stage.

The performance by Kelvin Rolston Jr. as Jean does a great deal to move those performances tonally closer to one another. Rolston Jr. has a sprawling charisma and swagger in his earliest scenes with Kristine that withdraws into itself when Miss Julie enters the scene in her Midsummer crown. As with Kang, Rolston Jr. does not shy away from his character's unpleasant traits, as he is rightly confident that the realities of Jean's life and specifics of his history as a talented and ambitious boy striving for something more will win the audience over, at least to an extent. In the scenes with Miss Julie alone, it's to Rolston Jr.'s credit that he keeps the focus on the class conflict and thus does important work backgrounding Strindberg's misogyny to a point, but there is ultimately only so much an actor can do on this front.

Miss Julie runs through March 8, 2026, at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit CourtTheatre.org or call 773-753-4472.