Set in the back kitchen of a fancy party during the debaucherous Art Basel festivities in Miami, Studio Theatre’s Queen of Basel is Hilary Bettis’ modern-day adaptation of Miss Julie, the 1888 classic Swedish drama by August Strindberg. Bettis admits in an artist’s statement that she hated Miss Julie upon reading it, turned off especially by Strindberg’s unapologetic misogyny in its preface. Her bilingual English and Spanish adaptation thus maintains little connection to the original other than the fact of its three characters and their power dynamics, as well as the kitchen setting.
To get into Queen of Basel, one must first ignore the nonsensicality of its premise: That the hotel heiress Julie’s reputation would for some reason be irreversibly smeared because a cocktail waitress, Christine, spilled gin on her dress, and that Julie would refuse to simply off or take an Uber home to change. Seems improbable, and yet it’s the only reason why Julie, Christine, and later Christine’s fiancé, John, find themselves confined to a cramped kitchen piled with boxes, the bass of Art Basel pulsing outside the doors.
“We’re stuck in purgatory, so we might as well talk to each other,” Julie tells John, and it’s this inevitability of stuck-ness that we must take for granted if the show is to go on.
Though its premise is unconvincing, Queen of Basel does manage an at-times provocative exploration of race, class, gender, and Latinx identity. Julie (played by Christy Escobar) is a gringa aristocrat with a Colombian grandmother; John (Andy Lucien) is a dark-skinned Haitian-Cuban; and Christine (Dalia Davi) is a Venezuelan refugee of Jewish descent. These hybrid identities are unveiled in pieces throughout the play, prompting the characters to both dissect and weaponize them. Though much of the dialogue is rather on-the-nose (“Being black doesn’t dissolve you of misogyny,” Julie yells at John at one point), it nonetheless feels satisfying to have so many of society’s inner monologues about racism, sexism, and classism laid bare on stage.
The play falls short, however, when the revelations about the characters end up reinforcing stereotypes, or simply feeling forced. Julie turns out to be exactly who we expect, rich and unhappy; she condescendingly offers to be John’s “angel investor.” John, meanwhile, is more nuanced: Much is made of the fact that he speaks Spanish and prefers wine over beer, subverting Julie’s initial assumptions, but pretty superficially. Christine’s story as the refugee who escaped President Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela is the most interesting of the three, but Davi enjoys the least stage time.
José Zayas’ direction of Queen of Basel adds some intrigue, with the characters circling each other on stage, and entering and exiting to create different combinations of the trio. Some of the moments in between dialogue are the strongest: Christine returning to an empty kitchen, Julie spinning in relapse revelry, John turning on a stark bright light. In its most physical, raw moments, Queen of Basel is entertainingly in-your-face with sex, blood, and tears. Julie and John have some legitimate chemistry, and it’s fun to see stuck-up Julie unravel over the course of the play.
Overall, though, the play seems to suffer from what I’ll call the Green Book effect. Like the 2019 best picture winner, the play traps its characters in a confined space so that they must grapple with their assumptions about each other, but the setup is so contrived that any sense of epiphany is too. Despite its attempts at depth, Queen of Basel is a journey that doesn’t really take us anywhere.
Queen of Basel runs at Studio Theatre through April 7. Tickets $67-$104. Runtime approximately one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission
