Pluck the characters out of classic drama, spin them around, and set them in motion in variations of the story they have inhabited forever. It's an exciting device, which Tom Stoppard beautifully put on the map with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the 1960s. So Bastards of Strindberg, four short pieces similarly transporting Miss Julie and her circle, has promise, particularly given the magical quality of the Swedish midsummer and the heroine's ambiguity and enigmatic end.  It is, all things considered, a promise fulfilled.

Perhaps most admirable is the trajectory of the four interpretations, moving from the semi-realist to utterly inside-out. David Bar Katz's Chanting Hymns to Fruitless Moons offers Julie as quite literally saving herself in the feminist/survivalist form of rewriting her own episode, and Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz is a strong, elegant savior. Lina Ekdahl's Midsummer at Tyrolen jumps into the absurdist; Pirandello-like, the central characters analyze, kid, and comment upon their fates in a kind of modern, Swedish upscale diner setting. High Powered by Dominique Morisseau returns us to the real and is the gem of the evening. Zenzele Cooper is downright hypnotic as an extreme tweak of Strindberg's Kristin, here a Bronx girl with a strength eclipsing that of her obsessively ambitious Jean (Darrin). Kwasi Osei's job is not easy - the angry, marginalized dude role is done to death - but he is wonderfully grounded, earthy, and real. Lastly, all bets are off with Andreas Boostra's The Truth about Froken Julie, in which truth in drama is exploded as a joke and simultaneously reverenced. Saving the piece from fatal smugness is the comic and chronic pissed-offness of Rikke Lylloff's Kristin. Let it be said as well that the running joke of Strindberg's Kristin's fondness for sleep very nicely links the plays, and in no way disrespectful to her Swedish creator.

What we have, then, is an interesting and challenging assortment of Strindbergian potentials, cool ideas, often excellent writing, and some grand performances. But why, why, is there perceived a need to have the ensemble engage in lengthy tribal dancing in between? If meaning is attached to the choreography, it defies human comprehension. It is as well crushed by the audience's sympathy for actors forced to undulate, flap their arms, and mutely emote.

Performances of Bastards of Strindberg continue through September 21. For more information and tickets, click here.