The Meaning of Broadway Part II: Machinal

“I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves! … The helpless- the degraded position of women is the presumption of my mind.”   -                                                      Sophie Treadwell, 1921

In my last post I asked, “Is murder the only way out of an unhappy marriage?”

 Well, obviously not.  Phew!  But when Sophie Treadwell wrote Machinal in 1928 things were a bit different.  And her question was not so much about the relative feasibility of divorce, but about what would drive a woman to do such a thing. 

The play was inspired by the sensational murder trial of Ruth Snyder, who conspired with her lover to murder her husband, whom she detested.  Apparently the husband was still in love with his late fiancé, calling her “the finest woman he had ever met.”  Snyder made several weak attempts to murder her husband before finally succeeding.  When she finally did, she claimed burglars had done it, only to have detectives discover the apparently stolen property still in the house.  Popular reporter Damon Runyon famously coined it “the dumbbell murder,” because of the perfect stupidity of the crime.  Snyder was the first woman to be executed at Sing-Sing prison.  Her death by electric chair caused a mass sensation when a photograph was released showing her body as electric currents ran through it.  (The photograph is quite tame by today’s standards.  For those interested, a link is here.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Snyder_chair.jpg 

But Treadwell was not interested in sensation.  She was interested in the underlying human drama.  What motivated an apparently simple woman to commit a crime so obviously not in her nature?  And what made her feel that divorce was not an option?  By all accounts, the husband was not abusive.  He did not threaten her.  She was not imprisoned in a physical sense.  And yet she was trapped. 

In her adaption of the story, Treadwell changed the circumstances of the crime, as well as the identities of the characters.  The play centers around a Young Woman (referred to as Helen by other characters but given no name by Treadwell) who is struggling to make ends meet working as a secretary.  She has an aging mother to support.  She is not very bright.  Fortunately, the owner of the company, Mr. J, thinks she has pretty hands and asks her to marry him.  Unfortunately, he makes her skin crawl.  The heart-breaking exchange she has with her mother indicates the circumstances of this union.

MOTHER: I’ll tell you what you can count on! You can count that you’ve got to eat and sleep and get up and put clothes on your back and take ‘em off again- that you got to get old- and that you got to die. That’s what you can count on!  All the rest is in your head!

YOUNG WOMAN: But Ma- Didn’t you love Pa?

MOTHER: I suppose I did- I don’t know- I’ve forgotten.  What difference does it make?

The title of the play Machinal, refers to the machine-like quality of life that this young woman lives.  Like a lifeless part on an endless assembly-line, she is pushed from one stage of life to another.  She goes through the movements of her wedding like an automobile through a drive-through car wash.  What is so fabulous about Treadwell’s depiction of the story is her use of expressionism to capture this robotic mode of living.  While one’s first instinct would probably be the use of realism to capture a historical event, Treadwell opted for a highly stylized manner of both speech and atmosphere, capturing a more emotionally realistic world for the characters to inhabit.  We see and hear the world onstage not as it looks on the outside, but as the young woman experiences it. 

My boyfriend, who was experiencing the play for the first time, observed that the dialogue sounded like a sort of spoken-word rap to him. While that didn’t exist at the time Machinal was written, I thought that was a pretty accurate description.  The staccato arrhythmic dialogue imitates the hard whirring of turning gears.  When done well, it is both hypnotic and disconcerting.

In Roundabout’s production, the Young Woman was portrayed by the magnificent Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Prestige.)  Hall was uncharacteristically unsexy in the part: naive, awkward, out-of-place, and sweet.  In the first moments of the play, we see her ducking between bodies in a crowded subway full of identical-looking men in gray suits.  She is unable to keep pace with the world around her; she only barely seems to understand what her coworkers are talking about.  Hall had the difficult job of carrying the weight if the unusual text without making her character especially unique or original:  the essential quality of the Young Woman is her ordinariness.  But Hall demonstrated her mastery of Treadwall’s text in her adept handling of the difficult first monologue.  After Mr. J’s proposal, the world around her stalls to a grinding slowness and a single light shines on the Young Woman.  In Treadwall’s strange poetry, we hear the gears of her mind turning.

YOUNG WOMAN : Marry me- wants to marry me- George H Jones- George H Jones and Company- Mrs. George H Jones- Mrs. George H Jones. Dear Madame.- marry- do you take this man to be your wedded husband- I do- to love honor and to love- kisses- no I can’t…. fat hands- flabby hands- don’t touch me please- fat hands are never weary… no rest- must rest- no rest… alarm clock- alarm clock- alarm clock…

                                         

                                                      Hall completes the possibility of married life

Hall resisted the temptation to overact these monologues, rather she trusted the audience to understand what it was she was talking about.  She captured a stillness that was almost paralysis, an attempt at decision-making where no choices were presented.

Other notable performances in the cast included Michael Cumpsty ( Flags of Our Fathers) as the unbearable Husband. (Aka Mr. J.)  He managed to be repulsive without being mean.  Overbearing, offish, stupid, and simply an impossible person to have around.  His self-congratulatory manner was never rude, but nevertheless obnoxious.  So when he bragged, for the hundredth time, “Well, I put it over- Yeah, I swung it- surely, they came through- did they sign? On the dotted line!”  I was pretty okay with the thought of him getting his brains bashed in with a bottle.  Even if he didn’t deserve it.

Ashley Bell as the sleazy Telephone Girl brought a fresh note of humor to the play, and Morgan Spector was mysterious and distant as the Lover.  

    

           "Did you swing it?"  "I swung it!"

The most exciting aspect of Roundabout’s production was their set design, a brilliant piece of inventiveness by Es Devlin.  In keeping with the style of the play, the set was an enormous piece of machinery.  This four-sided turn-table allowed for actors to walk out of one scene and into another as the stage moved.  Each of the four sides could be transformed into several sets, so while one scene was being showed on stage, each of the three hidden sides were being changed.  Of course, the Roundabout Theatre's plentiful funds helped to make this level of production possible, and there were a couple times when the design flirted with gratuitous "show-offishness." Also, from where I was sitting there were some sight-line problems in that I could see a couple of the changeovers taking place backstage and had to deal with a beam in my way on two occasions, but overall the effect was still magical.  At the turn of a wheel, the set transformed from a crowded subway car to an office, to a hotel room, to a speakeasy, to a dark alley, to a prison cell, and, finally an execution chamber. 

                                   

                                            "I will not be submitted- this indignity!"

The most effective use of the set was in the final scene of the play, when the Young Woman is being led to her death.  The script calls for a seemingly never-ending litany of saint’s being evoked for prayers. (Saint Joseph, pray for us, Saint Teresa pray for us, Saint Stephen…) When reading the script, I remember thinking there was no way this could work on stage.  But by allowing the set to endlessly turn as the characters walked, Devlin created the impression of a long road to death.  The walk from her prison cell to the chair must have seemed eternal to her, and in true expressionistic style, it seemed eternal to us.  And as she walked further and further on an endless wheel, the atmosphere of inevitable doom weighed heavier and heavier on her and on all of us.  The final image of the play, the sparks of the electric chair flashing through a glass window, left the audience in a shocked silence.

So how did this sweet, unassuming woman end up in an electric chair?  As she desperately confesses at her trial:

JUDGE: Why?

YOUNG WOMAN: To be free.

JUDGE: To be free?  Is that the only reason?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yes.

JUDGE: But if you wanted to be free- why didn't you divorce him?

YOUNG WOMAN: Oh I couldn't do that! I couldn't hurt him like that!

Unlike Bronx Bombers, not everyone in the audience stood at the end.  Perhaps it’s because they were too busy thinking…