Theatre in Review: Machinal (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)

	Rebecca Hall. Photo: Joan Marcus

According to my French-English dictionary, the word "machinal" means "pertaining to machines." The term is all too appropriate, for Machinal, the play, is a kind of machine built to drive its protagonist to destruction. As such, it is a bracingly unexpected -- not to say shocking -- start to the second half of the Broadway season. An expressionist experiment from 1928, and rarely seen since then, it could have come off as a theatrical curio, of interest only to drama students and theatre completists. Instead, it provides a thoroughly gripping 90 minutes, thanks to the contributions of three remarkable women.

First among them is Sophie Treadwell; not well-known today, she had seven plays produced on Broadway between 1922 and 1941, an era that is nobody's idea of a heyday for female playwrights. Even among the female theatre writers of the day, she was a singular presence, for Machinal is a fiercely uncompromising, bitterly unsentimental piece of work. Seemingly taking her stylistic cue from expressionist dramas like The Adding Machine and perhaps some of Eugene O'Neill's wilder efforts, it follows a young woman who is hopelessly detached from the materialistic, mechanistic society in which she dwells, as she progresses from the typing pool to the electric chair.

When we first see her, she is trapped in an overcrowded subway, on the edge of a panic attack. At the office where she works, she is so cowed by her colleagues' gossip and sniping that she can barely function; at home, she must endure the acid criticisms of the mother she supports. Eventually, she ends up married to her boss, a loudmouthed Babbitt who speaks almost entirely in business slogans. ("When he puts a hand on me, my blood runs cold," she confesses.) Bored, stifled, and frightened in ways that she can't articulate, she falls into bed with a merchant marine; the experience results in a kind of internal earthquake, awakening passions she has never before felt. Still, there is no escaping her deadly existence; the young man ships out, and before long she lands in court, defending herself against a charge of murdering her husband.

In its remorseless tracking of a woman's physical and spiritual destruction, Machinal must have been a total shocker in 1928, which probably explains its relatively brief ten-week run. (Treadwell took inspiration from the notorious case of Ruth Snyder, who was sent to the chair for murdering her husband, making her the first woman to be executed at Sing Sing in 30 years.) One wonders what audiences made of Treadwell's thesis -- that death is the inevitable outcome of living in a society that reduces people to little more than machines. Machinal has plenty to offer, but hope isn't on the list.

Whatever one makes of it, Machinal is stylistically rooted in another era, what with characters whose generic names (Young Woman, Lover, Husband) match their one-dimensional natures; a structure that consists of a series of "episodes," each a milestone in the Young Woman's descent into hell; and stream-of-consciousness monologues that occasionally interrupt the action. Without careful handling, it might seem risibly out of date. But the director, Lyndsey Turner, keeps the action moving at a furious pace, with dialogue that sounds like the clatter of typewriter keys and is punctuated with confrontations that bristle with barely suppressed rage. In the scenes set in the Young Woman's office and in a seedy bar, she uses overlapping dialogue to good effect, surrounding the Young Woman with crushingly banal conversations. Turner has also made sure that Machinal has a sleekly effective production design. Es Devlin's set is itself a kind of machine, an art deco box that, as it keeps whirling, takes us from an office to a bar to a hotel for one of the worst honeymoons in dramatic literature. ("Twelve bucks a day -- they really know how to soak you in these pleasure resorts," Husband says, in what passes for romance in his world.) The set's constant movement adds to the feeling of impending doom, as does Jane Cox's lighting, which often frames the action in narrow bands of white light that move up and down, scanning the stage like a medical device.

However, if Machinal is going to work, the Young Woman must be played by an actress who can take us inside her character, making us feel her creeping sense of dread, and later, the terrible need that drives her when she finally experiences sexual satisfaction. Rebecca Hall embraces the character's contradictions, her flustered, frightened manner contrasted with the powerful, yet deeply suppressed, feelings that are eating at her. She is particularly adept at handling the character's interior monologues, torrents of words that express in fragmented form that which she cannot say out loud. When the play briefly makes a sharp turn into naturalism for a post-coital scene with the Lover (the only character who doesn't spit his lines like tickertape from a machine), she achieves an emotional awakening that goes a long way toward explaining the crimes that follow.

It helps that Hall has a sensitive scene partner in Morgan Spector, as the Lover, who for the first time in her life gives her a glimpse of tenderness. There are also fine contributions from Suzanne Bertish, hurling accusations and demands as the martinet-like Mother; Michael Cumpsty, the very model of brutish self-satisfaction as the grasping, fatuous Husband; and Arnie Burton, double-cast as a predatory homosexual and an aggressive defense attorney. The production is meticulous in other ways, too: Michael Krass' costumes -- an amalgam of cloche hats, long strands of pearls, and three-piece pin-striped suits -- are period-accurate down to the underwear. Matt Tierney's sound design blends any number of effects -- wedding bells, riveting, crying babies, pop songs -- into a hostile urban environment that continually throbs in the background.

Thanks to the entire cast and production team, Machinal still stuns with its open-eyed view of a society bereft of feeling or anything faintly spiritual, and how it acts to stifle the life of an innocent. In 1928, a New York Times editorial stated that "in a hundred years," Treadwell's play "should still be vital and vivid." At 86 years and counting, that prediction is looking more like prophecy. -- David Barbour