When Women Take Center Stage is a blog series on dramacircle.org exploring plays that feature female protagonists. Our fourth play to consider is the 1928 play, “Machinal” by Sophie Treadwell. The play is a robust example of Expressionism as well as early-20th Century Feminist Drama.
Design sketch for Machinal by Robert Edmond Jones, 1928.
A Woman’s Vice Punished (but is she really to blame?)
By Mark Perry
[Review of Machinal (1928) by Sophie Treadwell]
Urgent and impactful. American plays from before World War II often feel half-baked, with uncertain plotting and opaque characters. This play is a LOT, but it is direct and effective. Its plotting is episodic, but arrow-straight in its focus. The theme is thesis-like in its bluntness, but it has the weight of undeniability about it. The characterizations are at once generic and specific. Characters are not referred to by their names, but by their roles. Still, Sophie Treadwell imbues the people with quirks and passions and the lingo and luridness of the day. The play is a kind of “Everywoman” for the 1920s. It is not, however, Everywoman that needs to repent, but the patriarchal world around her.
Still from 1933 Russian Production with design by Vadim Ryndin.
Machinal was written in the wake of the real life trial of Ruth Snyder, an unsavory character who killed her husband in cahoots with her lover. They were both executed in January 1928. Treadwell was one of the many journalists covering the story. When this play was produced in September, the story was still fresh in the public’s mind. The play used this wildly popular contemporary event as its fulcrum, but it served back a very different story. It avoided the voyeuristic entanglement of biographical detail and directed the audience to an examination of the society that might create such an individual.
A contemporary reviewer wrote:
“The play bears no likeness to the sordid facts of that cheap tragedy … Machinal transcends the drab drama of the police court; it has a quality one finds it difficult to define, a beauty that cannot be conveyed in words, an aliveness and reality tinctured with poetic pathos which lift it to the realm of great art, greatly conceived and greatly presented.”
With Machinal, Sophie Treadwell presented her time with a clear feminist statement: Women are forced, in this mechanized urban society, to submit and to relinquish their agency. The play does not show this by giving its central character (“Young Woman”) agency, but by showing how it is stripped away. We see how she is compelled, at critical junctures, and by people who seem to have her interest in mind, to take actions that literally make her gag and cringe. In its coerced suspension of the central character’s ability to self-navigate, it shares thematic resonances with Woyzcek.
Playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell (c. 1925)
The Young Woman, also known as Helen Jones, is caught in a claustrophobic city with no male provider for her and her nagging mother (cf. The Glass Menagerie). We don’t know if her father died in war or ran off. The Young Woman cannot avoid, given the rules of her society and the desperate hollowness of her life, marrying her boss, a man who makes her skin crawl. When she has a baby, she is traumatized and doesn’t want the child near her. She has a moment of tender release—a “little heaven”—in an affair with “Man,” who is very charming but in no way committal. (This role was originally played by up-and-coming star Clark Gable.) Feeling utterly trapped by her marriage, Mrs. Jones murders her husband the way a captive might murder her captor. There is then a courtroom scene and the electrocution. In her final moments, the Young Woman calls out for “Somebody”—as if seeking some sort of Savior for Womankind from the mechanical hell of modern disempowerment. That this is the play’s essential plea is upheld by its title, which is French for “mechanical” or “automatic.”
A “Little Heaven” — Zita Johann and Clark Gable in the original 1928 production of Machinal.
Machinal is not economical by any stretch of the imagination. The cast is large, and the staging is wide and broad, as it seeks to recreate city life with voices of all colors and modern sounds of all sorts. The script is long and repetitive, gaining some of its momentum from its relentless repetition. It could certainly use some trimming. With its focus on psychological extremity and inside-out staging, Machinal used the avant-garde mode of the time—Expressionism, and it is indeed a fine example of Expressionist Drama. This form suits well the play’s cry-for-help theme.
A modern staging of Machinal, fully employing Expressionist design techniques. (Auburn University, 2010. Scene and Lighting Design by Fereshteh Rostampour.)
Although this play is still performed, its urgency and its cry seem somewhat out of place in our modern developed world. Women are still far from full emancipation, but a regional theatre production of Machinal would hardly speak to the everyday lives of its audience. That being said, how powerful it would be if adapted to, and performed in, the urban environments of, say, India or the Arab world, where women’s rights continue to be stifled.
Machinal is included in the Norton Anthology of Drama, 3rd Edition.