MACHINAL

WRITTEN BY SOPHIE TREADWELL | DIRECTED BY ROSIE GLEN-LAMBERT

NOV 17 - DEC 3 | THEODORE AND ADELE SHANK THEATRE

VISIT WEBSITE BELOW FOR SHOWTIMES AND TICKETING

ABOUT THE PLAY

It is a deeply lonely task to try and fit yourself into a space where you do not feel you belong. In Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, Helen Jones-referred to as “Young Woman” in the script-finds herself constantly alienated by the patriarchal, mechanical world in which she lives. The subways are too crowded, her work is endless and repetitive, and at the age of 23 the pressure to maintain beauty standards, get married, and have children is consuming her. Navigating her way through the rigidity of this society, Helen feels like she is the only one struggling to conform, and she yearns endlessly for somebody to help her feel stabilized. Helen cannot manage to connect with anyone else for whom the pace and inflexibility of the world is similarly crushing, although the play strongly implies that others face a similar struggle. A scene that takes place in a speakeasy demonstrates that this is a world built to exclude, and it is stifling to anyone who is not a cis, straight, white, wealthy man. As a woman in this environment, there is an unrelenting and narrow forward motion to the Young Woman’s life, and the anxiety it breeds makes her desperate for an escape. It isn’t until she meets a drifting man who lives outside of this society that she sees a pathway for this escape: he mentions a time in his travels where he had to kill a group of men holding him captive in order to be free, and instantly she is intoxicated by and thirsty for the freedom he has. As a woman, she isn’t afforded the same opportunities he is to drift and live safely outside of conventional society, but she hears in the extreme of murder a leap she could potentially take. She has an affair with him, but more importantly she gets close enough to plot her own escape. Young Woman murders her husband in an effort to free herself from her narrow trajectory. Soon after, she is put on trial for his murder, found guilty, and put to death. Her last words before she is executed are “Somebody! Somebod-”

First performed on Broadway in 1928, Machinal may read initially as a period piece. References to speakeasies, “expensive” twelve dollar a night hotels, and radio certainly ground the play squarely in the circumstances of the late 1920’s. It is tempting to treat this play like a period piece, celebrating the peculiarities and sensibilities of the 1920s. But this interpretation does a disservice to the text, which was decidedly modern in its time. Revivals of Machinal must not fetishize the text or allow it to be something the audience can feel distant from. Sophie Treadwell wrote Machinal in response to the true story of Ruth Snyder, the first woman to be executed by the state of New York for murdering her husband. Ruth Snyder’s trial was highly sensationalized, and lead an entire nation to try to answer why a woman might murder her husband. Sophie Treadwell felt compelled to answer this question by writing an expressionist account of the stifling, misogynistic society women of her time were forced to contend with. Ruth Snyder’s trial was in 1927, and by 1928 Machinal was already being performed on Broadway. Sophie Treadwell did not set out to write a period piece about the 1920’s-she wrote an intensely urgent piece of theatre in response to the realities of her own modern times.

It is this spirit of urgency that is a driving force for me in staging my production of Machinal nearly a century later. A 2022 audience which is continuing to critically investigate the way our society has not been built with women, queer folks, POC, disabled people, Non-Christian people, etc in mind is uniquely qualified to empathize with Young Woman’s plight. Today, we are only beginning to discuss the complexity of gender in mainstream spaces. Words like “Cisgender”, “Nonbinary”, and “Trasgender” are becoming part of the zeitgeist, but widespread understanding of gender as something an individual asserts for themself rather than something a person is born with remains contentious. The majority of our systems and spaces continue to enforce a narrow approach to gender expression. One close-to-home example of this is that there remain only two gendered bathroom options on the majority of UCSD’s campus, including the ones on the two main levels of our own Theatre and Dance Building. This rigidity may go unnoticed by those it does not actively affect, but for the person who is neither a Man nor a Woman, having to select which restroom to use is a daily reminder that this space was not built for them.

It is well-established in the text that the qualities, behaviors, and milestones expected of a young woman in this society are crushing to Helen, and ultimately lead her to believe that murdering her husband is her only escape. But what if, more than feeling limited by the narrowness of being a woman, Young Woman is questioning whether or not she is a woman at all? It is no easy thing to try to explore the possibilities of your gender in a world where you lack the vocabulary to experiment with a term like “nonbinary” and the community you find when you’re able to google phrases like “does anyone else” or “is it normal if”. My production of Machinal will mine the text’s focus on Helen’s discomfort within the expectations of womanhood to explore the challenge of questioning one’s gender in an intensely binary world.

Reading Machinal, I fixate on an image of Young Woman racing endlessly on a treadmill. There are many reasons I find this to be helpful imagery. For one thing, treadmills are a mechanical simulation of running-something that we are naturally able to do independently of machines. Before treadmills were rebranded in the 1920’s as exercise equipment, they were invented in the 1800’s as a torture device for British prisoners. Modern treadmills are an important tool of a fitness culture which polices and controls women’s bodies. And probably most pertinently, treadmills are the epitome of stasis. Much like its cousin the hamster wheel, a treadmill doesn’t allow you escape from your circumstances. But as anyone who uses a treadmill habitually can attest to, it is often a place of deep contemplation, consideration, and decision making. I imagine the space in which Helen is running on the treadmill to be one where she is allowed to make her internal thoughts external, weigh possibilities, and feel shockingly contemporary in her vulnerability. Already as it is written, a 2022 reader will find themself feeling as if Helen lifts off the page. We feel she isn’t bad or wrong for feeling the way she does, and feel desperately pulled to reach through the text and tell her so. Through the simple gesture of a contemporary treadmill, I will create an intimate space in which the audience is allowed to see this character literally lifted out of her circumstances as she questions her ability to slow the trajectory of her life’s path.

Rather than either romanticizing the 1920’s or transposing the play onto modern circumstances, my production will guide its 2022 audience to draw parallels between Young Woman’s circumstances and their own lived experiences. While the nine episodes of the play will be staged in spaces that are filled with objects and people that feel authentic to the 1920’s, it will be the moments between these episodes, the moments where Helen considers whether or not to continue to do what she is expected to do, that are staged in the treadmill space. I am eager to invite the audience to meditate on how it is in our country's DNA to subjugate and pressure, and, regardless of the strides we have made in the past 100 years, how dangerously close we always are to the grim world Treadwell has imagined in Machinal. I want my audience to continue to fight for Helen to live even though they know she will perish, as a reminder to continue to fight for themselves–and for one another.