Machinal (1928)
by Sophie Treadwell

I am impressed. American plays from this period (say, 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, 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.

“Machinal” was written in the wake of the Trial of Ruth Snyder, 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 the wildly popular contemporary event as its fulcrum, but it told a 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 review wrote:

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. It has some thematic resonances with “Woyzcek”.

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 Clark Gable!) Feeling utterly trapped by her marriage, she murders him the way a captive might murder her captor. There is then a courtroom scene and the electrocution. In her final moments, she is calling out for “Somebody”—as if seeking some sort of savior for womankind from the mechanical hell of modern disempowerment.

“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. The play uses the mode of the time—Expressionism, and it is indeed a fine example of Expressionist Drama. This avant-garde form suits well the play’s cry-for-help theme.

At the same time, one wonders whether the play’s theme applies much anymore in the developed world. There would seem to be little urgency to producing it, for example, at a regional theatre. That being said, imagine how powerful it could be if adapted to the urban environments of, say, India or the Arab world, where women’s rights continue to be stifled.

MP