Machinal (NHB Classic Plays): 0

Product Information

Many of Treadwell's plays follow the traditional late nineteenth century well-made play structure, but some share the more modern style and feminist concerns Treadwell is known for, including her often anthologized Machinal. [3] Although Treadwell's plays primarily feature lead female characters, the women presented vary greatly in their behavior, beliefs, and social status. [3] Some of Treadwell's plays contain hints of autobiography from Treadwell's heritage to her extra-marital affair. [3] Below is a chronological chart of her known works. A hotel bedroom with a window overlooking a dancing casino sets the stage for the revealing the young woman’s decision. She and George have married and are on their honeymoon. They have just arrived as a bellhop brings in their luggage. The most striking aspect of this scene is its similarity to the previous episode. Like her mother, her husband is distracted while she tries to talk to him. He pulls her onto his lap and tries to get a little fresh before asking if he’s already told her a dirty joke about the pullman porter and the tart. He keeps trying to turn the subject to what’s under her dress, asks if she’s afraid of him and complains when she tries to go into another room to undress. As she disappears into the bathroom, he begins speaking about his plans to enjoy life from this point forward and muses about graveling to Europe next year. Finally, she reappears from out of the bathroom wearing a straight white nightgown. As George crosses to her, he realizes she is crying. The young cries out that she wants her mother—she wants somebody. The husband reminds her that she has him and there is nothing to cry about. Machinal premiered a year before the Wall Street crash demonstrated that the machine of American capitalism wasn’t infallible. “The play gives the lie to the image of the 1920s as a decade of unprecedented freedom,” argues Turner. “It’s a savage indictment of a society whose pursuit of efficiency and prosperity leads to a woman becoming trapped in the very machines designed to liberate her.” one-act written when Treadwell was only 20 years old; this play is set in an office in Chicago, IL and concerns economics and family matters [5]

Right, let's talk about something that actually is an undisputed Greek tragedy. When you watch Antigone, is your reaction that you just want to shake some sense into the heroine? written, staged, and produced by Treadwell, ran on Broadway March 1933, [4] after six years of work-shopping and edits by Treadwell [1] Weiss, Katherine. “Sophie Treadwell’s ‘Machinal’: Electrifying the Female Body.” South Atlantic Review 71.3 (2006): 4-14.

About the Play

Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist drama Machinal is an exploration of boundaries and excess, of the ways in which the everyday is pushed into the realm of extraordinary and exceptional as “an ordinary woman, any woman” is influenced by social and psycho-emotional processes to violently murder her husband. Machinal is both loosely based on the widely-reported and sensationalized murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, which led to the first sentencing of a woman in America to execution via electric chair, and a feminist piece technically echoing and responding to Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine. The soundscape of the play is distinctive, and rhythm is used to contrast mechanization and modernity with organic and embodied qualities of personal freedom and grace. The work is both fast-paced and cacophonous; dialogue between primary characters is discursively disrupted in shifting intervals. In episode eight, Helen is in the courtroom on trial for the murder of her husband, George H. Jones. The Lawyer for the Defense is defending her against the allegations. Trapped … Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector in Machinal on Broadway, 2013. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP A Young Woman,” Helen, is a stenographer for the George H. Jones Company. She is perpetually late, she feels stifled, she is the sole financial supporter of her nagging mother, and there is not enough space or air in her world. The gears of the industrialized early-twentieth century economy affect the organization of time and place in her life, and though young and innocent, she is at her breaking point. To escape her financial strains, she marries her employer, George H. Jones, who admires her for her beautiful and well-kept hands. She does not love Jones, and finds him repellent. Her relationship to motherhood is both resentful and traumatic, and it is not until taking a lover, a tall, dangerous, and well-traveled man who also expresses his own desires to access personal freedom, that she establishes her agency and sense of self. The trajectory of action leads to a courtroom scene in which the young woman is tried for her husband’s murder, and she is sentenced to death by electrocution. The electric chair ends the action as sinister deus ex machina. That's right. A true story about a woman who killed her husband. I don't think that's sending a very positive message.

This play is as annoying to read as any mechanical sound heard on repeat can be. The dialogue is purposefully repetitive and disjointed, but it only served to rouse my annoyance, not my sympathy. Helen, poor dear, did not have many things in her favour for me to root for her (if that is even the point? Are we supposed to feel sorry for her?). Filing Clerk is an unnamed, younger male character who, in the first episode, helps emphasize and embellish the noises of the office with his audible enunciation of letters as he files.A production of Machinal was presented by the CBU Boardmore Theatre Company at the Boardmore Playhouse, Cape Breton University, in Cape Breton Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Canada in February 2019. [23] [24] Rosie Sheehy plays the unnamed “young woman” and cements her reputation as an astounding stage talent with her magnificent performance, as physical as it is psychological. The play invites expressive choreography and this revival excels in its movement (by Sarah Fahie), seeming like a dance at times. Abetted by designer Miriam Buether and team, director Natalie Abrahami crafts a gaspingly claustrophobic series of vignettes. Twitching to Arthur Pita’s discretely pummeling choreography, the cast are hemmed in by a low, sloped, mirrored ceiling, with retina-searing bars of lights marking the frequent scene changes. It is intensely atmospheric.

A week after the opening, an unsigned Times article presciently observed, "The only recent play which seems a worthy candidate for preservation is Machinal. Its drama is so detached, impersonal and abstract that it seems timeless. In a hundred years it should still be vital and vivid."In 1915, Treadwell moved to New York, [2] following her husband who had already made the cross-country move for his career. [3] In New York, Treadwell joined the Lucy Stone League of suffragists. [2] Treadwell participated in a 150-mile march with the League, which delivered a petition on women's suffrage to the legislature of New York. [1] Treadwell maintained a separate residence from her husband, an idea encouraged by the League. [1] Her marriage was said to be one of mutual independence and acceptance of differing interests. [1] a b Taylor, Paul; Williams, Holly (18 August 2019). "The 40 best plays of all time, from Our Country's Good to A Streetcar Named Desire". The Independent . Retrieved 18 October 2020. a b "50 Greatest Plays of the Past 100 Years". Entertainment Weekly. 12 July 2013 . Retrieved 15 October 2020. Machinal is a play told in nine scenes, or “episodes.” Before the curtain’s first opening, machines can be heard rattling as office workers steadily plod along on their typewriters, adding machines, and other similar pieces of equipment. When the curtain lifts and the lights go on, the workers murmur to themselves as they go about their business. Between the telephone girl’s cheery greetings, the adding clerk’s spoken arithmetic, the filing clerk’s murmurs, and the stenographer’s correspondences, they talk to one another about a young woman named Helen, who’s late to work. They remark that this is the third time that week that Helen has been delayed. When she finally appears, Helen tells them she had to get off the subway because she felt trapped. Her colleagues ignore her troubles, moving on to tell her that the boss, George H. Jones, has been looking for her. “He’s bellowing for you!” says the telephone girl. The production received admiring notices. Brooks Atkinson, of the New York Times, wrote, "From the sordid mess of a brutal murder the author, actors and producer of Machinal… have with great skill managed to retrieve a frail and sombre beauty of character." Strangely enough, however, Atkinson admitted as to being unable to describe the play's "precise quality" in what he called his "ambiguous review." Theatre Arts wrote, "All sorts of things that do not strictly belong to the play, things that would be excluded by other playwrights, stray into Machinal and sink out of sight again, giving us glimpses and other dimensions which the ordinary self-contained play is too 'well-made' ever to tolerate.'"

Sophie Anita Treadwell (October 3, 1885 – February 20, 1970) was an American playwright and journalist of the first half of the 20th century. She is best known for her play Machinal which is often included in drama anthologies as an example of an expressionist or modernist play. Treadwell wrote dozens of plays, several novels, as well as serial stories and countless articles that appeared in newspapers. In addition to writing plays for the theatre, Treadwell also produced, directed and acted in some of her productions. The styles and subjects of Treadwell's writings are vast, but many present women's issues of her time, subjects of current media coverage, or aspects of Treadwell's Mexican heritage. [1] Sophie Treadwell on U.S. auto tour Heritage and childhood [ edit ]

titled The Life Machine in the London premiere, [3] premiered on Broadway September 1928-November 1928 and was revived on Broadway January 2014-March 2014. [4] The story of Machinal is told over 9 scenes by 29 identifies characters. [5] Six distinct settings appear in the play: office, house, hotel, hospital, bar, courtroom, prison, [5] The main character in the play is the 'young woman,' played in the 2014 Broadway production by Rebecca Hall. [4] None of the characters are named, but identified by their station or occupation. The story is loosely based on the murder trial of Ruth Snyder. This play has also been revived off Broadway and on television and is, by far, Treadwell's best known work. [3] A production of Machinal was translated and adapted in Filipino ("Makinal") by thesis students in the University of the Philippines Diliman, in April 2019.