Behind the Curtain: Meet Our Director and Co-Adapter of Miss Julie, Emily Pugh.
We’re getting to know our director, Emily Pugh! From her love of classic material to bringing Miss Julie into 2026, we caught up with Emily to learn more about her creative process, her vision for the play, and what inspires her work.
Emily! Tell us a little about your background in adapting. What draws you to classic material, and what do you love about working with it?
I’ve always been an avid reader. From an early age, I’ve been obsessed with works of classic literature from Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The poetry of each novel from the visceral language to the rich characters always drew me in and ultimately inspired my love for stories and storytelling.
However, it wasn’t until college that I became fascinated with adapting classic material. Sitting in an Old English class translating a 10th century poem called “The Wife’s Lament,” I grew captivated by the narrative voice and the ambiguity of the story. Over the course of that semester, my translating quickly transformed into rewriting and adapting this poem into what became a solo-performance theatre piece, reviving the narrative voice for modern audiences in modern English.
Ever since then, I’ve shifted my creative practice towards adapting classic material from Greek Tragedies to Russian Literature. I enjoy the creative puzzle of taking stories that audiences think they know and showing them the missing pieces. By uncovering the urgent questions buried within familiar stories, as a director, I get to help create theatrical experiences that invite audiences not only to feel deeply, but to leave questioning what they thought they knew about the play, themselves, and the world around them.
What was your process for bringing Miss Julie into 2026? What excited you most about reimagining this classic for a contemporary audience?
August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is a seminal play in the theatrical canon. With its dense, poetic text and complex characters, Miss Julie is an exciting challenge for both actors and directors, but it is also mired with dramaturgical issues. The play often feels like a museum piece as it more aptly reflects the time in which Strindberg was writing with strict class distinctions and social etiquette, distancing modern audiences. The play is also Strindberg’s response to the female protagonist because his contemporaries, like Henrik Ibsen, were writing plays that sympathized with and emboldened independent women. Strindberg’s thesis with Miss Julie was that if women are given enough rope, they’ll hang themselves; deeply problematic and blatantly misogynistic, I know. Thus, the exciting challenge in reimagining the piece for contemporary audiences was to answer the following questions: how do we smooth out these dramaturgical wrinkles, how can we invite audiences into this world, and why this play now?
Our answer to these questions was to re-contextualize the play.
We set Miss Julie in 2026 in the home of a wealthy Republican Senator instead of an 1880s aristocrat, drawing parallels to our current political climate. We also wrote all the characters as female in order to give Julie more agency and invoke themes of identity and sexuality rather than misogyny and “natural womanhood.”
What excites me most about the piece is we get to invite audiences to ponder these new themes within the framework of the play’s innate poetry and striking characters. With our intimate staging, Miss Julie is a visceral theatrical event that I’m looking forward to audiences experiencing.
What themes in Miss Julie are you most interested in exploring? What conversations or questions do you hope the play sparks for audiences?
I’m particularly interested in exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and identity in Miss Julie, especially the tension between who we are, who we want to be, and the roles society has assigned us. What fascinates me about these characters is that, as much as they fight to defy the positions they were born into, they are also deeply dependent on them. Their identities are shaped by the very structures they are trying to escape.
With an all-female cast, I’m especially interested in exploring sexuality and desire within a repressed, conservative environment. What happens when the people we are drawn to, or the desires we feel, challenge everything we have been taught about who we are supposed to be? How do we reconcile our sexuality with the expectations of our families, our communities, and even ourselves? There is something deeply compelling about the intersection of desire, shame, power, and repression, and how the inability to openly express who we are can manifest in destructive and sometimes devastating ways.
At its heart, I see Miss Julie as a play about loneliness and our desperate need for connection, intimacy, validation, and freedom. I'm interested in how we become trapped in patterns of behavior, inherited expectations, and ideas about ourselves that no longer serve us. And how, sometimes, the very things we desire most are the things we have been conditioned to fear. I hope audiences leave the show asking themselves: What are the cages we've built around our own lives, and what parts of ourselves, our histories or our expectations do we need to cut away in order to move forward?
What’s a dream project you’d love to direct? Tell us what’s on your artistic bucket list!
There’s a long list of projects I would love to direct from plays to musicals to poetry, but at the moment, I would love to stage a play I wrote a few years ago called Jocasta: Mother of Thebes. The play is an adaptation of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, reframing the famous narrative to focus on Oedipus’ wife and purported mother, Jocasta. In the first half of the original play, Jocasta is portrayed as a strong woman with firm ideals, but by the end of the play, she has very little stage time. In the final scene, suddenly a messenger arrives onstage announcing Jocasta has killed herself. Every time I read the play, I always come back to the same question: why would a woman who is so sure of herself commit suicide? Did she actually die or is that just a story fed to us? Jocasta: Mother of Thebes is my exploration of these questions, giving Jocasta a more prominent narrative voice while also providing context as to the events leading up to her decision to take her own life. Mixing modern language with traditional elements of Greek Tragedy, such as a Greek Chorus and live music, the piece is a massive undertaking, but one that I look forward to tackling in the future.
When you’re not directing or adapting, what are some of your other loves, hobbies, or
creative projects?
Outside of directing, I love to sing. I’m a classically trained coloratura soprano, so I enjoy delving into a challenging aria every now and then or even just belting out a musical theatre song at karaoke with friends. I’m also a very active person. Anytime I can be outdoors is ideal (especially when it’s not over 90 degrees and humid). From swimming to running to doing yoga in the grass, I relish soaking up the sun and admiring the nature around me. All of these hobbies help me unwind, but they also inspire and feed my artistic practice.
Join us for this intimate, site-specific production and experience how Emily Pugh brings this classic story to life!
Emily Pugh Bio: Emily Pugh is an Atlanta-based director, theatre maker, and multidisciplinary artist. She is a recent Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University, where she earned a BA in Performing & Media Arts and Literatures in English.
Her work is rooted in a lifelong fascination with language, imagination, and the poetic possibilities of theatre. Whether reimagining classical texts or developing new work, she seeks to uncover the urgent questions buried beneath the visible surface of a text, crafting visceral theatrical landscapes that render interior emotional worlds tangible. Emily has trained with the British American Drama Academy, the Prague Shakespeare Company, Juilliard Drama faculty, and artists from Punchdrunk and Complicité respectively.
Some of her directing credits include True West (Risley Theatre), Chicago (Melodramatics Theatre Company), and Eurydice (Risley Theatre). She also assistant directed and devised Baba Yaga (The Cherry Arts) and performed in the world premiere productions of Orlando's Gift (Cornell University) and the musical DREAM (Prague Shakespeare Company).
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