“Dance of Death” at Kinetic Theatre Company

The Pittsburgh Tatler: August Strindberg had an (in)famously torturous relationship with women, and he is often thought of as one of theatre history’s great misogynists. Certainly, his portrayal of women in some of his naturalist plays – as in, for example, his rather meanspirited portrait of the haughty and hysterical aristocratic Julie in Miss Julie – accord with records, in his diaries, of his own experience of women as a source of sexual and psychological torment. But his works can also be read (perhaps only in retrospect) as evidence of his insight into the ways in which traditional gender roles impacted relations between the sexes and – in particular – created the conditions for terribly unhappy marriages.