To the editor:

The April 9 review of “Miss Julie,” presented at the Lawrence Arts Center by English Alternative Theatre, describes the production as “confusing.” After attending the production, I can only say that the review is producing the confusion. Not only are the three performers — Jan Chapman, Phillip Schroeder, and Jacqueline Grunau — all excellent in their roles, but Paul Lim’s direction finds new dimensions in August Strindberg’s play.

Who should write a theater review? A person knowledgeable about theater, first of all. “Miss Julie” introduced audiences in 1888 to a type of stage character never before seen, but encountered every day — ordinary people, full of contradictions; both strong and weak, good and bad. Audiences still seek interesting complexity in characters on stage or in films. The reviewer complains, however, that the motivations of Julie and Jean, her servant-lover, are ambiguous. Exactly — that’s Strindberg’s realism.

The reviewer complains that the play’s “feminism goes in and out of focus.” Strindberg was not a feminist; rather, he describes Julie instead as quintessentially “modern.” The aristocrat Julie and the ambitious Jean are products of their environment, in Strindberg’s determinist view. Separated by impenetrable class and gender differences, they have, not a relationship, but a collision that leaves them both shattered. With a better knowledge of modern drama, the reviewer might have appreciated how this production spoke anew to its Lawrence audience about men and women’s continuing struggles to understand one another.

Iris Smith Fischer,

Lawrence