"Miss Julie," The Fountain Theatre, West Hollywood, CA

Wow.

The Fountain Theatre’s Miss Julie, directed and adapted by Stephen Sachs from the play by August Strindberg, will take your breath away.

Sachs gives us a seamless and startling adaptation of Strindberg’s story of a mistress of the house.

Sachs set the story in 1964 in civil rights Mississippi, where the metaphor of collective and individual independence – read class conflict - resonates with the idea of the freedom marches and the thralldom of madness in the person of Miss Julie (Tracy Middendorf).

John (Chuma Gault) is the chauffeur to the judge. Christine (Judith Moreland) is the kitchen help. They just want to serve the judge, get married, and fulfill the limited destiny available to a black couple in the Deep South in the mid Sixties.

Problem is, sweet, gentle, Christine attends meetings of a civil rights group with the potential to agitate the unfair but functional status quo. John poo-poos her attendance.

But that’s small potatoes in the person of the havoc and mayhem wrought by Miss Julie (Tracy Middendorf).

At first we think she’s just drunk. Young, drunk, and beautiful, drowning her broken engagement in a little edgy fun. Imagine what Quentin Tarantino would do with this.

Then her demons creep in. Demeaning tasks, demanded with manorial authority, perfunctorily performed. The depths of her depravity: having chauffeur John (Chuma Gault) decapitate the bird she wants to bring to Chicago after he/she rapes her/him. The innocent bird, the virginal mistress: it’s a bloody mess.

Her back story: a mother who went mad; ordered the men-folk to do the women’s work, the women-folk to do the men’s work.

Middendorf’s performance is nothing short of miraculous. She captures the madness that is so charismatic – think seductive prophets - because it’s framed in an ostensibly stylish package. Within the same sentence she goes from fiddle-dee-dee sweet and charming, flirty smile, beaming eyes to unhinged alpha shrew, eyes a-rage, voice a cacophony of mania. She darts across the stage – on the floor, on that table – like a sandpiper with a huge expanse of virgin beach.

Her mercurial nature is reflected to some degree by an equally miraculous performance by Gault. Their chemistry is perfect. At first he’s Mr. Stay out of Trouble. Then he crosses the line of propriety and then of reason with her; then he hies back to plantation Machiavelli. He utters his final hypnotic command, as she skulks out the back door with the knife, in a voice from which goose pimples are made.

Grounded, despairing but not demented, Moreland’s Christine is the perfect counterfoil to these two. You empathize for her weary plight, you intuit a birdsong of hope for the meetings she attends, and then that final resignation of what for her will prove to be one long hot summer.

Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. The play runs until May 6. Tickets are $25-28. The Theatre is located at 5060 Fountain Avenue, West Hollywood. For more information call (323) 663-2235 or visit http://www.fountaintheatre.com.