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A heady rush of Midsummer night's steam enveloped the American Airlines Theatre Oct. 23 with the arrival of Patrick Marber's 2004 play called After Miss Julie, after August Strindberg's bedrock study of sex as the great leveler of class.

As you may already know, someone's in the kitchen with Julie, and it seems to be an inside job. It seems to be her father's valet, John — and, by Jove, it is. While these two throw proprieties and station out the window to create a new and tragically imperfect union, social barriers are similarly toppling outside the estate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but all this takes place on July 26, 1945. "There is a long and boring reason for that, but it's true," the playwright offered after the show. "Strindberg set his play on Midsummer's eve in the Swedish calendar, which is the longest day of the summer — and, traditionally in Sweden, it's a kind of bacchanalian, let-your-hair-down, celebratory night where strange things can happen. I needed to find an English equivalent. We English don't really do much celebrating, but, on this particular Midsummer's eve, England was celebrating — celebrating the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a new Labour government, roughly equivalent to the Obama Moment last year. There was a sense things were changing. There would be more social justice, more movement between the classes."

The date marked the start of the entrenched upper-crusts' crumbling decline. The head-strong and self-destructive Miss Julie embraced the fate of her class and was seen right before the play begins, kicking up her heels with the locals in town. Once the play begins, her democratic spirit intensifies, and she lustfully lasers in on the family's heretofore faithful servant, who, knowing his place, loved her from afar.

Marber said he cut himself some slack doing the adaptation, eschewing a line-for-line translation. "No, I've been quite free and quite liberal with it. The action is sort of the same story, told differently." As for his objective in redoing the original text, he said, "I suppose I wanted to simplify and clarify a few things. Strindberg's play is quite mystical in places. I'm not a very mystical person so I think I wrote a tighter, tauter play that Strindberg. I'm not saying it's better. I'm just saying it's leaner."

Most of his writing these days is for the movies. "I've just done a screenplay of an Ian McEwan novel called 'Saturday,' and I'm now working on the screenplay of a Zoe Heller novel called 'The Believers.' Zoe Heller wrote 'Notes on a Scandal,' which I adapted into a movie four years ago."

He said he hadn't given up on playwriting. "I'm trying," he sighed, "but it's slow."

Director Brokaw is moving on to other things, too: On Monday, he starts rehearsals up at Yale Rep on Pop — Pop as in Bang, it being a musical about the shooting of Andy Warhol. Randy Harrison is the shot, and Leslie Kritzer is the shootee. "It's written by Maggie Kate Coleman and Anna Jacobs, who graduated in 2008 from the MFA program at NYU."

He had seen a couple of Miss Julies in the past and counted himself a fan of Marber's overhaul. "I think the thing I am most moved by is that, in that constant power struggle between men and women, class is still alive. It's not something that changes. It's evergreen. It's something that is always valid to look back on and explore again. What I'm haunted by in this play is just that relationship — how they can love each other and, at the same time, be so cruel to each other and, at the same time, need each other so much. That's what will always be current in this play."

He gave his cast full credit for the valor and fearlessness in putting the play over. "I'm proudest of their work. The actors are all terrific. They've been very brave in the kind of emotional commitment they give this play, which is very demanding."

Brokaw exhibited a little bravery himself by giving Christine a protracted stretch of dramatic inactivity; she's left abandoned on stage for a small eternity to putter around the kitchen. "It's in the play," he quickly pointed out. "Actually, when it was written, it was considered to be very controversial for that reason. Patrick, very wisely I think, decided to keep that part of the play alive in his version of the play."

He estimated that this was about two and a half minutes of dead space, but Ireland, who has to execute it, believed it closer to three and a half. "Strindberg called that section a pantomime and said something funny in an essay in the preface — 'The actress playing Christine in the pantomime should actually behave as if she's really alone' — like, it was a revolutionary idea, a big step to have naturalism in theatre!

"In the original and in Patrick's version, it's laid out first as a big task, but we quickly discovered, after the first few days of staging it, that there are lots of other things that just have to be accomplished. Basically, we worked up a to-do list. We would sorta look around, and then it would be like 'Well, what do you need to do next?'

View the Entire Photo Gallery Sienna Miller Photo by Aubrey Reuben

"Honestly, for me, it became about threading together each little thing, and then we were able to layer in the emotional narrative on top of the narrative of just kinda getting this done and that done. It's incredibly liberating. I don't know if I have ever felt quite so relaxed on the stage as doing that. It's really just sorta doing your task."

The flighty, dismissive way Christine is treated by Miss Julie in their final scene together — "You'll find a husband" — drew some opening-night titters, and this wasn't the first time, Ireland admitted. "That really surprised us — until we realized how tense the section right before it was. We realized, 'Oh, people are really waiting. They really want to get a release — and they're really kinda hopefully thrilled to see the two of us on stage together again at that moment after all that's gone down.'"

Should she ever need an atmosphere soak, I suggested Ireland check out Five Napkin Burger at 45th and Ninth. The décor echoes the sprawling country-estate kitchen that set designer Allen Moyer made for After Miss Julie. Indeed, it could handily pass for any production of Miss Julie.

The male Miller was as delighted as the female Miller about making their mutual Broadway bows together, but he had to admit this was doing it the hard way. "The hardest thing is the concentration when you're negotiating the huge twists and turns that Patrick's play takes," he said. "You have to make these huge turns of thought and these huge turns of emotion in a very, very short space of time because of the pressure put on the characters. It's difficult to execute that — to find that, to find the truth in that and to make it believable to an audience so they can buy it."

He, for one, contended that his character had grown in the new translation. "I feel that John is an amazing character, to begin with, but I particularly love Patrick's version because of the war-veteran elements — the fact he's damaged goods much more, I think, than in Strindberg's version. He has this damaged element. Something went wrong with him over there. I like that. It makes him more vulnerable to me."

The star herself emerged from her 90-minute knockdown-dragout ordeal on stage looking daisy-fresh and drop-dead beautiful. That, she cracked to the press, was an illusion. "This role is massively draining," she said heavily, and then, sifting gears, she added, "but that's exhilarating for me. I love being exhausted by acting.

"I've wanted to be on Broadway for as long as I can remember, and, when Patrick Marber asks you to be in one of his plays, you say, 'Yes!' It was a no-brainer."

Her only previous stage experience was a slight brush with Shakespeare (Celia in As You Like It) in London's West End in 2005 — but she pulled out all the stops for Miss Julie. "I feel empathy for her in certain sections, and I understand — because of the research that I've done on my own — why she is the way that she is."

Her fashion statement was a Balmain mini-dress — a stylish mixture of tinsel and golden glitter, but with tatters that echoed the sexual roughhousing that the wearer had just experienced on stage. "It's quite a number," she had to admit. "Somebody picked it out for me."

It certainly perked up the press line. Once she had finished with interviews and photos, she pressed on to Espace, an elegant eatery (very) west on 42nd Street where she greeted well-wishers and dived into the penne and vegetables.

Heading the receiving line were Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Dancy, "old marrieds" of a month and a half. (She's Claire Danes, Roundabout's Eliza Doolittle.)

Paul Huntley, wigman extraordinaire, got the wig design credit on the program, but, truth to tell, Miller reverted to her own hair at the last moment. "The playwright took a dislike to it," Huntley explained. "She loved it."

Playwright David Hare arrived with wife Nicole Fahri and a dog-eared copy of the brand-new "Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told." Impulsively, he broke into a drive-by plug: "I've read it already, and I'm lending it to somebody else because everybody wants to read it."

"I didn't give you a very nice photograph — let's do it again," Jill Clayburgh purred persuasively to photographer Aubrey Reuben, who quickly obliged. She was with her son, the actor (Michael Rabe). Her daughter, the actor (Lily Rabe) was away in Oregon, for gosh sakes, making a movie.

Also: Rachel McAdams, legendary lyricist Sheldon Harnick, composer Charles Strouse (who got the great Bye Bye Birdie reviews) with wife Barbara, Byron Jennings and actress-wife Carolyn McCormick, Boyd Gaines and actress-wife Kathleen McNenny, director-designer Tony Walton, director-choreographer Rob Ashford, just-plain-directors Michael Greif and Gordon Edelstein, Betsy Aidem who is in Uma Thurman's "Motherhood" ("I'm in it, as much as you saw in the trailer," she dirt-kicked), Sam Rockwell , designer William Ivey Long, Patch Darragh and Heather Randall, looking great enough for two passes at the paparazzi.